When to use?
The primary purpose of in-person or virtual leader-led training sessions is to provide participants opportunities to observe expert demonstrations and practice performing specific skills in a staged scenario-based environment.
The Performance Support platform allows us to flip live sessions and eliminate information heavy PowerPoint lectures. The training will also focus on how to use, and rely on the platform, which contains key information that no single person or group of individuals could master. Additionally, short virtual sessions could be used to introduce and set expectations of the learning experience before participants attend the core live/virtual session. In this holistic ecosystem, we can efficiently develop new skills by applying proper instructional design with meaningful objectives, contextualized and sufficient practice, model-based examples, elaborated examples, and extended support.
Design Strategies
Deliberate Practice. The key to developing expertise is deliberate practice. While some of this can happen during formal instruction, expertise has to be developed outside the classroom, as that is where most of us spend our time.
Flipped Classroom. A pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. The flipped classroom allows us to engage learners in solving meaningful real-world problems related to their workplace behaviors or competencies, rather than to drown learners by a fire-hose of information. Additionally, this approach ensures learners in the classroom are immediately motivated to seek information, properly organize and construct their knowledge-base, and make smart and timely judgments.
Accelerated Learning. Information is simply raw building materials. Knowledge is what learners build out of those materials and incorporate within themselves. Without learner processing, no knowledge is created. Learning only occurs on the learner’s side of the tennis court. We either get the ball in the learner’s court, or nothing happens! The whole body (not just the brain) is the mind and the main vehicle for learning. If your body doesn’t move, your mind doesn’t groove! Most people learn best, not by themselves in isolation, but with others. Rich social interaction has been proven to improve learning for most people most of the time. The more we learn together, the smarter we’ll be! The best kind of learning is most often a result of enjoyable passionate, whole-body engagement in creating new knowledge, understanding, skill, and value. Learning is best when it’s play. The classroom environment needs to be an enjoyable playground for the student, not a cage. We need to bring back joy in learning and stop suppressing the human spirit!
Gagne’s Nine events of Instruction. Focuses on presenting the knowledge or demonstrating the skill, providing practice with feedback, and then providing learner guidance. (learn more)
Project Based Learning (PBL). The core idea of project-based learning is that real-world problems capture students’ interest and provoke serious thinking as the students acquire and apply new knowledge in a problem-solving context. The teacher plays the role of facilitator, working with students to frame worthwhile questions, structuring meaningful tasks, coaching both knowledge development and social skills, and carefully assessing what students have learned from the experience. Advocates assert that project-based learning helps prepare students for the thinking and collaboration skills required in the workplace.
Game-Based Learning (GBL). Within an effective game-based learning environment, we work toward a goal, choosing actions and experiencing the consequences of those actions along the way. We make mistakes in a risk-free setting, and through experimentation, we actively learn and practice the right way to do things. This keeps us highly engaged in practicing behaviors and thought processes that we can easily transfer from the simulated environment to real life. (learn more)