This course provided my first foray into creating a training/consulting project. I found the hands-on nature of this course to be exciting and applicable to my career objectives. Donald Kirkpatrick, Robert Bjork and Peter Block provided foundational concepts for effective training and consulting. Mel Silberman and Elain Beich added the scaffolding around which I create leadership training programs. 

 

The Kirkpatrick Model advocates beginning with the end in mind, identifying desired results or behavior and creating content with a built in evaluation plan. Training is not an event rather a relationship that solves an overall problem and can be measured over time through improved key company metrics. 

 

The research of Robert Bjork taught me three important ideas about how the brain learns and retains information. First, forgetting enhances remembering. Second, spacing. Spacing is a process of teaching smaller segments of information over several short periods of time which stores it at a deeper level in the brain. Third, interleaving. Interleaving is a process of jumping between topics. Instead of teaching in a block (AA,BB), a trainers interleave information (A-C-B, B-C-A). Understanding how the brain learns and stores information allows me to create training content that maximizes retention which in turn increases the probability the information will be available for retrieval and application after participants return to the workplace.

 

Peter Block introduced me to four consulting best practices and the MECE method to categorize  root causes and solutions to problems. First establish a collaborative relationship. Second solve problems so they stay solved. Third attend simultaneously to the technical problem and the relationship. Forth foster client commitment. MECE (mutually exclusive/collectively exhaustive) provides a framework for analyzing problems. I found this process helpful to determine training objectives, training content, delivery methods and evaluation processes.

 

Mel Silberman and Elain Beich’s, Active Learning, taught me the principles of adult learning and how to create an effective, motivating training course. The biggest take-away for me was the importance of understanding the problem to be solved and designing a course around solving the problem using multiple learning methods. Effective training is characterized by an empirically measured change in behavior or key metrics overtime.