| Matthea Marquart |
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Matthea Marquart, MSSW, is Director of Professional Development Design for Professional Services at Wireless Generation. She was named a “2008 Young Trainer to Watch” by Training Magazine. Her NYNPblog explores ideas around developing the skills and potential of nonprofit staff so that organizations can provide the best possible service to their clients. The opinions expressed here are personal opinions of Matthea Marquart, and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Wireless Generation.
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Blog book tour for Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers
Jane Bozarth (http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com) is an expert and evangelist for using social media for effective training - in fact, one of the reasons I first joined Twitter was because I’d heard her express her enthusiasm for it during her webinars. And now she’s literally written the book on it - Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Expanding Learning. I was eager to get to take a look at it as part of her blog book tour, because I’ve found her previous books to be really practical and useful.
In the nonprofit training community, many of us can be skeptical about incorporating new technologies that we’re not sure our training participants will be able to use due to time, expense, or lack of computer skills. At the same time, we all care about making sure our training is high impact, so that we can help make a difference in improving our services for our clients. So I’m going to focus here on one simple, low-tech way to extend training’s impact using Twitter, from the second chapter of Bozarth’s book - it’s a great idea I’m excited to share, because it addresses a real training challenge.
When designing training, a serious concern is “How will we help participants actually DO what they’ve learned once they get back to work?” Jobs are hectic, people forget, and behavior change is difficult. One promising solution is to use Twitter to help your participants bring your training content with them back to their real lives.
You can do this using a free application (Bozarth mentions Social Oomph, Twaitter, or Brizzly) to set up timed, automatic Tweets to your training participants periodically after the session. The messages can provide encouragement, remind participants about key points, share links to articles on the same topic, announce related upcoming events, and give gentle nudges to participants to use the skills and knowledge from the training session.
The Tweets will support your participants in implementing what they learning in training, and it will also create an extended learning community. Because you can set up the Tweets in advance and because Twitter and the Tweeing application are free, this is a training add-on that won’t take much of your time or resources.
If you’re curious about trying out social media to increase the value of training, this could be a simple yet high-impact way to start.
Changing learners’ perspectives can change their behaviors
Last week, respected e-learning provider Allen Interactions (www.alleninteractio ns.com) offered a free lunchtime webinar series featuring Ethan Edwards, their Chief Instructional Strategist and author of the free ebook Creating e-Learning that Makes a Difference, downloadable at http://info.alleninteractio ns.com/ccaf-e-book/.
Each of the four days covered one of the elements of their CCAF (Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback) design model for creating e-learning that actively engages people’s minds in order to change their behavior in a meaningful way. Edwards pointed out that engaging people’s minds is different from simply testing whether they can regurgitate facts. He said that whereas many e-learning programs claim to be interactive because they include tests, genuine interactivity gets learners thinking and teaches them in such a way that they change their point of view.
I attended one of Edwards’ excellent Allen Interactions ASTD e-learning instructional design workshops years ago, so I know he’s an expert presenter and I was excited to attend the series. The key points and links to recordings from each day are below.
Context
An inviting and realistic context for e-learning helps people understand the point of what they they are learning and motivates them to engage with the e-learning. It sets the stage for success by creating a relevant experience that is obviously worth the learner’s time and attention.
Rules of thumb - good context should:
1) be immediately obvious as soon as the learner opens the e-learning
2) relate to the audience’s needs
3) create concrete experiences
4) suggest a real-world performance environment
5) be helpful as a reference point for what the participants are learning
6) be visually appealing
http://www.alleninteractio ns.com/online/1_Context.wmv?utm_campaign=Context
Challenge
Edwards pointed out that a good challenge needs to tie in with the learner’s motivation, which is usually not the same as the company’s or the e-learning designer’s motivations; this direct appeal to the learner’s motivation can counteract complacency on the part of learners by getting them to care about the e-learning. Possible learner motivations include interest, success, curiosity, reward, or just plain completing the task. On the other hand, learners are usually not motivated by tests, so unless a test is absolutely required, the learners’ performance can be evaluated by providing a challenge that requires the skills and knowledge taught by the e-learning.
Rules of thumb - a good challenge should:
1) be clear
2) increase in difficulty as the learner’s skills improve
3) relate to the learner’s motivation
4) offer a meaningful risk of failure
http://www.alleninteractio ns.com/online/2_Challenge.wmv?utm_campaign=Challenge
Activity
Edwards shared that the most common activity in e-learning is reading or listening, neither of which are particularly engaging activities. In addition, there is no real way to tell if these are even being done by the learner or not. With reading and listening, any learning that happens is basically a matter of chance. Reading and listening are commonly followed by an assessment, which only shows whether a learner can recall the right answer.
A good activity, however, helps the learners recognize the right answer by applying what they’ve learned. It simulates key real-world activities, which makes it much more likely that genuine learning will actually occur.
Rules of thumb - a good activity should:
1) create physical involvement
2) build commitment to learning
3) encourage investment
4) transfer ownership of the learning from the e-learning designer to the learner
5) involve all of the senses because the story behind the activity is is so fully fleshed out
http://www.alleninteractio ns.com/online/3_Activity.wmv?utm_campaign=Activity
Feedback
Feedback is a motivating opportunity to teach learners, as they will naturally be interested in learning about why their decisions during an activity were correct or incorrect. When e-learning is designed well, the context peaks the learners’ interest, the challenge and activity let them apply it, and the specific feedback deepens their understanding and lets them monitor their own learning. When e-learning is designed poorly, it dumps all of the information on the learners at once, asks them to regurgitate it during a test, and then punishes them if they don’t remember everything, without telling them what was wrong or why.
Rules of thumb - good feedback should:
1) clearly communicate correctness
2) preserve the learner’s response for reference
3) deliver new content, as learners will be much more interested in content at the point of feedback
4) demonstrate the consequences of non-performance
5) continually reinforce the context
6) delay judgement, to allow the learners time to figure something out for themselves
7) be compelling to the learner
8) require correct performance
http://www.alleninteractio ns.com/online/4_Feedback.wmv?utm_campaign=Feedback
This week's ASTDNY Training Director’s Special Interest Group was on the topic “Effective Communication and Influencing Skills for Learning Professionals” and featured executive coach Ginny O’Brien, author of Coaching Yourself to Leadership and founder of The Columbia Consultancy, a leadership-deve lopment coaching firm.
Be mindful about yourself, others, and your business
O’Brien opened by talking about the three components of her trademarked integrated leadership model, which are the same three components needed for effective influencing:
1) Lead authentically, from your heart. This requires a deep understanding of your own personality and values.
2) Build respectful relationships with others. This requires developing your emotional intelligence so that you can establish trust and build rapport with others.
3) Communicate a vision. This requires being able to think strategically about where your business is now and where you want to go, and then being able to articulate how to close the gap between the two.
More info about this model is available at www.columbiaconsult.com.
Communicate assertively
O’Brien focused on the following tips for assertive communication:
* Project confidence with your body language - show that you believe in your own idea
* Be clear - avoid rambling by writing down your message before talking about it
* Know where your audience is coming from and adapt to it
* Ask powerful questions to gain understanding
* Maintain your emotional boundaries, so that you don’t get deflated or lose hope
* Use deep breathing to control your physical reactions to your emotions
* Listen deeply - the more you listen, the more you can adapt your message in such a way that it will actually influence people
* Practice visualizing a time when you were at your most powerful and influential - see it and remember what it felt like when you were at your best, and then practice calling up this image and how you felt, so that you can tap into this feeling quickly at any moment. You can use this both to prepare for important conversations and to regain control of yourself immediately if you hit an emotional trigger that makes you lose momentum.
Talk in such a way that others can hear you
O’Brien shared that effectively connecting with and influencing others requires consciously adapting your style to match others’ styles, and she referenced the DISC personality profile as a tool for doing this. The DISC model groups behavioral characteristics into four general styles, which everyone displays to varying degrees:
1) Driven people tend to care about directness, clarity, concision, logic, data, and the win. They hate wasting time.
2) Influencers tend to care about harmony and relationships, and so they seek out the win/win. They tend to care more about engaging with people than about data.
3) Steady, amiable people tend to like logical methodologies and need time to process information. They hate to rush.
4) Compliance-focu sed, analytical people tend to care about detailed and organized data, and they tend to stick to the facts over personal relationships. They don’t want to be pushed into decisions, and they don’t want long conversations.
Her tip for figuring out which style is a person’s dominant one - which will guide you in matching your style to theirs - is to first look at a person’s energy in groups. Drivers and Influencers are extroverts, so their energy will be high in groups, whereas Steady and Compliance-focu sed people are introverts and will exhibit low energy in groups. From there, look at a person’s work style. Task-focused people will be Drivers or Compliance-focu sed, and harmony-focused people will be Influencers or Steady people.
A new meeting feature
SIG Chair Sanford Gold introduced a useful new meeting feature called Community Time, which sets aside time for the group to share challenges, solutions, and resources.
ASTDNY President Lance Tukell and President-Elect Jim O’Hern closed the meeting by encouraging participation at the chapter’s upcoming summer events, which can be found on www.astdny.org.
The latest issue of the journal Afterschool Matters is available online today at http://www.niost.org/content/view/1645/297/. This issue is a special one with a focus on professional development, and Zora Jones Rizzi, Amita Desai Parikh, and I have an article in it called "Using E-learning to Train Youth Workers: The BELL Experience." Afterschool Matters is a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at the Wellsley Centers for Women, with support from the Robert Bowne Foundation.
In collaborating on the article, I was grateful to have the opportunity to talk with Managing Editor Georgia Hall, who offered insightful direction, and work with Editor Jan Gallagher, who provided skillful editing and guidance.
The article's downloadable at http://www.niost.org/pdf/afterschoolmatt ers/ASM_Spring2010.pdf, and here's the abstract: "BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) cut training costs by two-thirds and improved outcomes for students in its summer program by developing e-learning modules for program staff and managers." Hall's Welcome from the Editor says, "Marquart, Rizzi, and Parikh, in 'Using E-learning to Train Youth Workers,' offer an effective model for overcoming familiar challenges to staff training such as limited resources, staff turnover, and multi-site programs. BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) has successfully implemented blended online and in-person training to train its summer program staff."
Keep it simple, crisp, and focused on clients
During the last couple Leadership and Strategy classes, Professor Sermier provided some perspectives on good professional writing that I thought would be useful to share.
"If you can't make a crisp argument, you probably don't understand what you're talking about."
Simplicity and clarity not only help others understand, but also demonstrate the writer's understanding. People who understand something deeply can express a complicated idea in plain English, because they know how to reduce the idea to its essence. On the other hand, people with a lack of understanding often try to hide their confusion behind overly elaborate language.
"In 40 years of professional life, I've never read a document of more than four pages that had any value."
As described above, good communication is focused and clear. Most lengthy documents can be boiled down to include just the good information hidden within too much text.
For the most part, executives should receive short documents with three components:
1) the problem
2) potential solutions
3) the recommendation and why
"If the clients say the service is lousy, the service is lousy."
As usual, Sermier emphasized keeping the clients in mind. Fuzzy writing can hide clients and their needs behind confusing metaphors, irrelevant statistics, insignificant anecdotes, and more, which distracts people from what should be a nonprofit's main purpose - serving clients. On the other hand, clear writing can bring challenges to light so they can be addressed.
"Don't waste people's time with spelling or grammatical errors."
Always read documents over before sharing them.
New York Nonprofit Press is a great resource for job postings via the E-Newsletter, website, and monthly newspaper.
However, if you're engaged in a serious job hunt, you'll need to use more than one resource to find job openings. So, you may want to check out this listing of 97 nonprofit job boards. It's available here: http://j.mp/7eBuVC or http://bit.ly/cvSqsA
Thank you to Nathan Grimm, @n8ngrimm, for sharing this resource via Twitter. (I'm at @MattheaMarquart if you'd like to get in touch.)
Action Learning Conversations open up new thinking
Tonight's ASTDNY chapter event featured Dr. Victoria Marsick, Co-Director of the J.M. Huber Institute for Learning in Organizations, a principal of Partners for the Learning Organization, and Professor of Adult and Organizational Learning in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Dr. Marsick introduced the concept of Action Learning Conversations (ALCs) as a tool for peer mentoring and coaching. ALCs are 45-minute group conversations using the ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, and Decisional) Framework, which moves conversations from focusing on the objective facts of the situation, to reflecting on feelings and reactions, to interpreting what the feelings and reactions mean, and finally to deciding on what actions to take.
ALCs provide a structure for getting help from peers and seeing situations in a new light. Rather than discussing or debating a challenge, which can activate defensiveness and entrench people in old ways of thinking, ALCs require listening, questioning, and thinking together, which can transform people's perspective. ALCs create an environment of win-win, where people can learn in a safe space, rather than win-lose, where people end up judging each other and closing off their thinking.
The five steps
1) Share a challenge framed as a question. The person with the challenge shares, then the group asks clarifying objective questions to learn more about the context of the situation. Then the person with the challenge may indicate the specific help needed.
2) Question-storm. Everyone silently writes down one or two reflective or interpretive questions, then the group shares the questions in a round robin while the person with the challenge silently listens and writes. After this, the person with the challenge may share a few insights learned so far, while the group listens without asking any questions.
3) Share assumptions. Everyone writes down their assumptions about the situation, and then the group talks about the assumptions as if the person with the challenge were a fly on the wall. The person with the challenge silently listens and writes, and is invited to join the conversation only after everyone else in the group has had a chance to share their thoughts.
4) Reframe the challenge. Everyone writes down how they would re-frame the original question, and then the group shares these in a round robin while the person with the challenge silently listens and writes. After this, the person with the challenge may share a few insights learned so far, while the group listens without asking any questions.
5) Identify action steps. The person with the challenge identifies next steps.
Tips for successful ALCs
Dr. Marsick advised that diversity of thinking is helpful for ALCs, so if members in a group all know each other well, it's useful to get a couple less familiar people to join in. Also, if one group member is known to be a strong personality, it can be helpful to get a facilitator, to prevent that person from taking over the ALC. Facilitators are also good for groups who have trouble following specific processes, especially because it can be difficult for people to ask real questions rather than asking fake questions that are really problem-solving advice in disguise. When the fake questions start flying, facilitators can step in and model what it looks like to genuinely inquire about facts, feelings, or thoughts.
The proof in the pudding
We had a chance to practice a mini-ALC during the chapter event tonight, and my group was really helpful with the challenge I shared. In the end, the ALC process succeeded in uncovering some of my hidden assumptions, in helping me reflect on other perspectives, and in reframing the challenge into one with a more optimistic outlook.
Recommended reading
* Understanding Action Learning by Victoria Marsick and Judy O'Neil
* Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work by Marilee G. Adams
* Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change by Chris Argyris
* "The Political Brain," by Michael Shermer in the July 2006 Scientific American, reporting on research by Emory University psychologist Drew Weston
Professor Sermier's Leadership and Strategy class last week focused on the use of evidence and data to manage better. Sermier emphasized that when setting goals, leaders need data - they need both accurate information and an understanding of why the data tells that story. With this data, leaders can get unexpectedly powerful results; without it, leaders can waste countless resources by sending organizations in useless, ineffective directions.
Sermier also encouraged the class to remember to focus on our clients. When doing so, data becomes framed as information in service of the clients, rather than simply being cold numbers. Therefore, Sermier suggested that leaders only request that someone do the hard work of providing accurate data if there's at least a 75% chance that the data will enable better decision-making to benefit clients.
Facts vs. opinions
To punctuate his point, Sermier referenced the following quote attributed to former Netscape CEO James Barksdale, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in a Harvard Business Review article in January 2006: "If the decision is going to be made by the facts, then everyone's facts, as long as they are relevant, are equal. If the decision is going to be made on the basis of people's opinions, then mine count for a lot more."
Relevance for nonprofit trainers
In the same way, trainers need to focus on client-centered facts over opinions when designing training sessions. Session design should begin with a needs assessment that considers data, rather than with preconceived ideas and assumptions. Designing training based on evidence will allow trainers to develop staff in a way that meets clients' actual needs, and serving clients in this way is a real win for nonprofit trainers.
Last week was Public Affairs Week at Baruch College, and the Wednesday topic was New Directions in Financial Oversight, with Michael Alix and Jonathan Chanis, PhD.
Alix is a senior vice president at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, working in the Bank Supervision Group (although he noted that he was expressing his personal opinions); previously he served as the chief risk officer at Bear Stearns. Chanis is Managing Member of New Tide Asset Management, LLC, and has worked in finance, and emerging markets and commodities trading for over 20 years; he is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of The Energy Forum, and a trustee of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.
Both speakers said that they are in favor of well regulated financial markets, but they had different perspectives about what that means.
Chanis explained the difference between the "financial economy," which deals with managing money and credit, and the "real economy," which deals with actual goods and services. The financial economy is supposed to be an adjunct to the real economy. He explained that the economic crisis was triggered by problems in the financial economy which then impacted the real economy, and he suggested that we need to figure out the optimal size of the financial economy in order to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, because the financial economy had recently grown so much that its impact on the real economy was enormous. From there, we need to regulate the financial economy to prevent companies and people from making a profit by taking advantage of the government; for example, right now if a bank takes a risk and loses, the government bails them out and makes the taxpayers pay for it, but if a bank takes a risk and wins, they get to keep all the profit.
Alix appeared to be in favor of much looser regulations. He said that financial market reform has the goal of supervising the collective systemic risk from all institutions, rather than supervising individual institutions. He said that regulation requires redesigning "incentives, infrastructure, and insolvency regimes," and making information more transparent and accessible so that we can have insight.
Keeping it simple
In a breakout session afterwards, Professor Sermier pointed out that the message of the evening could be boiled down to the idea that it's not reasonable to expect human beings to operate against their own best interests. For example, at the individual level, if given a choice between making a lot of money quickly or not, most people will choose the money for themselves and their families, even if it's not the "right" thing to do because of a risk of contributing to a financial crisis. That's why we need the government to protect us from ourselves by establishing sensible regulations.
Takeaway for trainers
The idea of regulating the financial markets is about making people do the right thing even when it's easier or more tempting to do the wrong thing or to do nothing. Just telling people about the right thing will not change their behavior, so we need to do more.
In the same vein, just telling people about a desired workplace behavior will not make much of a difference. That's why training needs to go further - we need to motivate participants to improve or change, persuade participants about the value of the new skills, help participants practice new skills, let participants plan how they will use their new skills when they are back at their jobs, involve managers in supporting the change, and essentially help participants do the right thing on the job even when it's easier to or more familiar to do the wrong thing or nothing.
Last week's Leadership and Strategy class featured guest speaker Dall Forsythe, Professor of Practice at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service and former budget director for the State of New York under Governor Mario Cuomo. Forsythe and Professor Sermier were colleagues at the NYC Board of Education under Chancellor Frank Macchiarola. They discussed their experiences with leadership in government and also shared concrete career advice.
Three career tips for the short term
Forsythe shared three career tips for young professionals interested in public service:
1) Be able to communicate well both with words and with numbers. Governor Cuomo used to say the following when hiring a candidate with little experience: "What's the difference? He's smart and he can write well."
2) Understand politics.
3) Consider working in a budget office. They are great places to work - you learn a lot, you gain skills, and you gain professional credibility.
Three reasons to find your passion in the long term
Sermier shared three reasons to find your professional passion:
1) If you are ambitious and want big opportunities in your career, you need to develop the right skills and a good reputation; this requires actually doing the work well over time, which requires passion.
2) To be a good leader, you must display optimism, and in order to do that during tough times or amidst irritations, you need to work at a job you value, so that the small stuff is irrelevant to your fulfillment.
3) If you work at something you enjoy, you won't need to make a lot of money because you won't be obsessed with retiring.
During last week's Leadership and Strategy class, Professor Sermier shared his sequential ten-point framework for managing and leading an organization:
1) Know yourself
2) Know your boss or bosses
3) Know your key executives and staff
4) Terminate non-productive executives
5) Identify your key stakeholders and what each wants
6) Identify your five major problems
7) Identify your five major goals
8) Communicate your major goals
9) Actively pursue your goals
10) Celebrate your successes
The first step is to know yourself, because until you can manage yourself and get comfortable with yourself, you won't be able to manage anything else.
Additional dimensions: focusing on clients and motivating teams via respect
Sermier shared a perspective of leadership as essentially including everything involved in management, with an added dimension of doing the right thing. In nonprofits, doing the right thing means keeping your clients in focus at all times, and making sure that the focus on clients guides decision-making.
For many nonprofit staff, that focus on clients will be inspiring. However, that's not all that's needed to motivate and lead a team. To motivate people, you must show them respect, and because that's a vague concept, Sermier clarified what it looks like to do so:
* Learn and remember names
* Never complain
* Make your team members look good
* Publicly support your team when the stakes are high
* Publicly take the heat for the team's mistakes
* Use "we" when talking about problems, to signal that you see solving problems as a team effort
* Be hopeful within reason; give your team a sense that there's a better future
* Accomplish things together, then celebrate together
* Encourage dissent
* Hold yourself accountable, and admit mistakes
* Give credit and praise
* Be guided by a moral compass
Community Offers Collegial Support, Ideas, and Humor
Last Thursday, I participated for the first time in a weekly live online Twitter event called #lrnchat. This is a weekly guided discussion about training and learning, organized around a particular topic, with participants joining in from around the world via Twitter or a Twitter conferencing suite (I used twubs.com/lrnchat). #lrnchat's tagline is "Where Learning & Social Media Meet." Participants range from newcomers to widely known experts in the education/training/learning/e-learning fields. Transcripts of the chats are posted on the @lrnchat Twitter page, and are also searchable using the hashtag #lrnchat.
What are these about?
Thursday's topic was "Your perfect learning environment?" and the questions were
Q1) If you had a blank slate, what would your ideal learning environment look like?
Q2) what are the barriers keeping your ideal learning experience from becoming real?
Q3) What would be the most important positive thing that could happen to make that ideal state become real?
Bonus) How could #lrnchat as a community, help with either boosting the positive or beating back the negative?
The previous week's topic was "Confessions of trainers and learners," and this week's topic is "The Learning Delta," with questions about how training has changed over the years and how it will change in the future.
How could it benefit nonprofit trainers?
Chatting with training and learning enthusiasts last week was a great way to step back from the day-to-day of my job and hear other professionals' ideas about the field. The conversation was informal and honest, which encouraged participants to take a risk and share their thinking. When patterns emerged, it was interesting to see where folks shared idealist hopes or pet peeves, and it was also interesting to see where people respectfully disagreed.
For trainers who work in small departments or as the only trainer at their organization -- which is the case in many nonprofits -- #lrnchat offers a community of like-minded professionals to learn from, bounce ideas off of, and provide mutual support.
Participating in #lrnchat also taught me a bit about the potential and limitations of using Twitter as a learning tool. As a new Twitterer, it let me jump right into a new type of learning and try it out in a safe environment, and it was a lot more fun and useful than I'd expected. At first, with so many Tweets going by really quickly at times, it felt a little overwhelming, like trying to take a sip from a waterfall, and it was an adjustment to be in such an informal learning environment, with a lot of joking around and friends greeting friends. However, it didn't take much time to get comfortable, and the value of the event quickly became clear.
If you'd like to give it a try
Events take place on Thursday nights at 8:30EST and last for 90 minutes; this week they are adding an ongoing afternoon event at 4:30EST on the same topic. #lrnchat is hosted by@marciamarcia, @quinnovator, @moehlert, @koreenolbrish, and @janebozarth (I first heard about this on one of Jane Bozarth's webinars). Artwork is by@delanotho. For more information, you can go to http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/
Find a job where you fit, you care, and you accomplish with a team you respect
Last week's Leadership and Strategy class (see my post from 2.3.10 for more info) focused on understanding how organizations work, in order to make good decisions.
Professor Sermier led us through a comparison of the private, nonprofit, and government sectors using the following lenses:
1) The bottom line
2) The complexity of processes
3) How success is defined and measured
4) The value of evidence vs. the value of opinion when making decisions
5) The role of competition
6) How CEOs are evaluated
7) The impact of the press
Career advice
Sermier, whose career has included jobs in each of the sectors, shared the advice that in order to give ourselves the best possible chance to succeed in our careers, we need to choose the right sector, the right part of the sector (for nonprofits, that means social service, cultural, university, foundations, or health care), the right size organization, and the right organizational culture and structure. Perhaps most importantly, we need to find the right fit for our passions, because it's difficult to succeed at something that we don't care about.
Whatever the sector, when we've chosen a job, it can be helpful to keep our thinking simple and remember that any organization is basically a bunch of people trying to get something done together. With that in mind, some keys to success at work include:
* treating people fairly
* encouraging enough dissent to know that you're doing the right thing
* setting up rewards for doing well and penalties for doing poorly
* creating a common statement about what you're trying to accomplish as a group
* avoiding creating too many rules, while at the same time establishing basic systems that help people understand their common interest
Last Thursday (February 11), I attended a panel at New York University on Teacher Quality: The Key to Closing the Achievement Gap?
The panel was moderated by Dr. Amy Ellen Schwartz, NYU Professor of Public Policy, Education, and Economics, and Director of the NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy. It was presented by The Wagner Education Policy Studies Association, The Wagner Economic and Finance Association, and the Institute for Education and Social Policy.
The panelists were:
* Sara Coon, Director of Evaluation and Organization Development at Achievement First, a network of charter schools in New York and Connecticut
* Kim Marshall of the Marshall Memo and New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit that recruits, trains, and supports urban principals
* Jen Mulhern, a Partner for Policy at The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that recruits and trains teachers with the goal of ensuring that children with high need get outstanding teachers
* Peter Oroszlany, founding Principal of Mott Hall V Middle School in the South Bronx, one of the top ten schools in NYC
Dr. Schwartz opened by discussing the persistent and disturbing achievement gap across the US between children from poor and wealthy communities and between children of different races. She pointed out that the national discussion once focused on fixing this problem by tackling it at a macro level, but because the problem still persists, national attention is now turning toward the micro level, specifically focusing on teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Marshall pointed out the importance of this focus by referring to widely cited research showing that five years in a row of effective teaching for every child could completely close the achievement gap (Hanushek, Kain, O'Brien, & Rivkin, 2005), but right now any US child has only a 1 in 17,000 chance that this will happen (Walsh, 2007).
The panelists discussed ways to recruit and retain excellent teachers, measure teacher performance, develop a culture of high performance, and hold teachers and principals accountable for student outcomes. One key they mentioned was teacher professional development.
Key notes about teacher professional development
* Marshall said that "teacher mediocrity is widening the achievement gap" and one way to change that is by providing the professional development needed for teachers to improve dramatically. He said this should involve catching teachers' issues in real time and fixing them right away so that they don't build up, as well as having teacher teams look at student data in real time and decide how to take action.
* Oroszlany suggested that professional development is essential for modeling lifelong learning and for professionalizi ng teaching as a respected career; he encourages the teachers at his school to invest in their own professional development, and he creates opportunities for them to take the time for development.
* Mulhern said that meaningful professional development is essential for supporting teachers, particularly new ones, so that the job is not sink or swim; she noted that there is a lot of bad professional development out there, so there "needs to be a sea change" in improving the quality and applicability of teacher training so that it covers how to use and apply data and strategies immediately.
* Coon said that the best professional development is ongoing and job-embedded, with a great deal of coaching and feedback, which is why Achievement First assigns a coach to every teacher and treats "teaching as a team sport." For schools without the resources to do this, she said that online professional development that includes video will be necessary to help develop teachers.
Panelists' recommended readings
* Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles. Who's Teaching Your Children? Why the Teacher Crisis is Worse Than You Think and What Can Be Done About It.
* Daniel Weisberg, Susan Sexton, Jennifer Mulhern, and David Keeling. The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Teacher Differences.
Advice from senior leaders
Tonight's ASTDNY Training Director's Special Interest Group featured a panel of senior learning leaders discussing "Managing your Career: Skills and Competencies associated with the CLO Role.' The panel was assembled by Dr. Lyle Yorks, and the panelists were:
* Dr. Lyle Yorks, Associate Professor of Adult and Organizational Learning, Columbia University's Teachers College
* Sherwin Chen, Vice President of Learning, Prudential
* Bettina Kelly, Senior Vice President, Talent Strategies Group, Chubb & Son
* Jeff Wetzler, Senior VP, Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development, and Chief Learning Officer, Teach for America
* Deborah Wheelock, Leader of Global Talent Management, Mercer
The panel offered advice for training professionals about getting ready for top leadership roles in learning and talent management.
Be an asset - build personal credibility
Dr. Yorks kicked off the panel by sharing some of his research on the traits of successful Chief Learning Officers. His advice: "Be an asset. Be able to present your work as a key enabler to meeting business strategy."
The panelists echoed this concept of the importance of personal credibility, focusing on the importance of being able to deliver results both as an individual contributor on a high profile project and by assembling a great team of people and putting processes in place that enable the team to pull off great things. The keys are to demonstrate what you can do, project emotional strength and resilience, and always have an opinion but be willing to change it based on data.
Develop political savviness
Two quotables on the topic of political savviness were Chen's "It's all about people's perception of you and how you can influence people who don't report to you" and Wheelock's "Be savvy to the point that when you have a meeting, you already know the meeting's outcome because you've done your pre-work of talking to people."
The panelists advised developing deep relationships with people at all levels of your organization, building allies and coalitions within your organization, networking with people outside the organization to learn about their strategies, and understanding the company's climate. Learning leaders need to be able to lead laterally, including motivating and inspiring people around you.
Develop business acumen and a deep understanding of your business
All of the panelists stressed the importance of sharp business skills. Wetzler advised, "Deeply know the business, the industry, and the company's priorities and strategy. Think about the big picture and be a learning strategist." Kelly advised "Be agile, and know your organization's current appetites and where the opportunities lie."
When discussing business acumen, the panelists talked about the need to manage change, convey the learning function's return on investment in business language that appeals to senior management, connect the dots about how your function contributes to the company's strategy, forecast what the workforce will need to be able to do in the future and build the company's competence to do it, and be able to quickly assess a situation and communicate what you see.
Readings recommended by the panelists
* HR Competencies: Mastery at the Intersection of People and Business, by David Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank, Dani Johnson, Kurt Sandholtz, and Jon Younger
* Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change, by Patricia Shaw
A simple differentiation between management and leadership
Tonight was the first night of Ed Sermier's Leadership and Strategy course at Baruch College's School of Public Affairs, which I'm excited to be taking this semester with many of the United Way Senior Fellows from my cohort in 2008. The course will be examining the concepts of leadership, management, and strategy in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Since a lot of trainings focus on leadership development, I'll share some of the insights from this semester here in this blog, as there will be many relevant takeaways for nonprofit trainers.
One thought-provoki ng takeaway from tonight's class was Sermier's description of the difference between management and leadership: management is about doing things right, and leadership is about doing the right thing. This means that managers focus on efficiency, which is essentially about making existing processes better, whereas leaders focus on effectiveness, which includes thinking about the existing picture and making changes if something should be different in order to be right. Because leaders need to understand the existing picture in order to think critically about it, they need to have a strong understanding of management.
Sermier asked the class to remember that in nonprofits, an important part of being a leader and doing the right thing is helping people who have the least power -- our clients -- especially when the people who do have power lose sight of them.
Allison Rossett is taking a look
Yesterday I attended a Training Magazine webinar featuring Allison Rossett on the topic "Elearning Is Not What You Think It Is." I've been a fan of Rossett since I got to see her speak this summer at the International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace and The eLearning Guild's Instructional Design Symposium (see my blog posts from 6.10.09 and 8.3.09 for details), and she was excellent once again.
Rossett is a professor at San Diego State University, and she and one of her colleagues, Jim Marshall, recently conducted a study on today's definitions of e-learning, today's e-learning practices, current aspirations for e-learning in the future, and organizational barriers to e-learning. In yesterday's webinar, Rossett shared some of their study's findings.
It was interesting to learn that amongst the almost 1,000 respondents, the top five e-learning practices today are:
1) Our programs include tests of skills and knowledge
2) We use computers as part of classroom instruction
3) Our programs present content and opportunities to practice and receive feedback. Employees work on these tutorials at a time of their own choosing.
4) Our programs use visuals with an audio track. Employees watch and listen at a time of their choosing.
5) Our programs are based on realistic scenarios which press employees to make choices and learn from the results of those choices.
The least selected response was "Our programs are delivered on mobile devices."
If you'd like to see the recording of the webinar, it's archived on Training Magazine's network at
http://www.trainingmagnetw ork.com/topics/show/893
or
http://bit.ly/arossettrecordi ng.
If you'd like to participate in the study, Rossett and Marshall are still collecting data, and the SurveyMonkey link is available at
http://tinyurl.com/elearningpracti ce.
There are so many websites with free instructional videos that I thought it would be useful to compare three that trainers may be able to use. (See my prior post "Resources for free university-qual ity educational materials" for some additional websites with free videos.) The sites below are well regarded, with many thousands of users, but each one is quite different from the other two.
Academic Earth (academicearth.org)
Academic Earth currently offers video courses from UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. The videos range in length from one minute clips of speeches to entire courses with twenty or more separate video lectures. The website's goal is to provide everyone on earth a user-friendly, one-stop location for accessing a world-class education. Videos feature leading academic scholars and can be explored by topic, school, instructor, thematic collections called "playlists," or by doing a search. The website's design is secondary to its function, so it's organized in a straightforward and intuitive way. Videos are not extremely high quality, but they have a professional feel.
TED: Ideas worth spreading (ted.com)
TED, which started out as a conference that brought together Technology, Entertainment, and Design, offers "riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world." It has grown to include the topics of Business, Science, and Global Issues. Because of its origins, the website's design is much more sleek and cutting-edge than the other two sites. For example, while the videos can be explored by topic or by doing a search, they can also be explored by "newest," "most emailed this week," "most comments this week," "most favorited all-time," or by the following ratings: jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny, and informative. Most videos are longer than the average video online, starting around 15 minutes, as the talks, presentations, demonstrations, and performances go in-depth. The speakers include thought leaders and celebrities.
Teacher Tube (teachertube.com)
As you might guess, Teacher Tube appeals to a specific audience of educators. The website's goal is "to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos." Like YouTube, videos are contributed by members, and membership is free and open to anyone. Thus, the videos are not professionally filmed or edited, but rather homemade. They include videos of people talking directly into the camera, animated PowerPoint presentations, animations, staged skits, and even singing and dancing. The videos can be explored by doing a keyword search, or by categories that reflect the primary goal of creating a community: featured, recently added, most viewed, top rated, most discussed, most favorite, most linked, and most responded.
Last Friday, I attended a workshop titled "Strategies for Delivering Effective eLearning in Trying Times," hosted by e-learning company Kineo. I had worked with Kineo's UK partnership when I was at BELL, and they recently launched Kineo's US arm. It was a pleasure to see Kineo Partner Mark Harrison again, as well as meet US CEO Steve Lowenthal and US VP of Learning Design Cammy Bean.
As part of the workshop, Kineo demo-ed many of their e-learning designs, which can be seen on their website, kineo.com. It was interesting to see samples of their work, as well as several diverse ways the open source learning management system Moodle can be customized.
Here are six ideas from the workshop that you might find useful, especially if you work at a nonprofit that's short on time or resources:
1. Speed, rather than excellence, is the new wow factor. The difference between excellent and ok design is sometimes just not that big a deal anymore, but the difference between taking weeks to meet a project's goals versus taking months is truly impressive.
2. Use a fuzzy graphic to keep reviewers from ruining a project. Cammy shared a time-tested designer's trick for solving the problem of having too many reviewers who all want to put their mark on a project even when it's to the detriment of the project - intentionally include a fuzzy graphic. If you include a flaw like a fuzzy graphic, the reviewers can point it out and thereby feel like they've made a contribution (and hopefully leave the rest of the design alone).
3. You'd have to be bonkers to pay for an expensive LMS. With open source LMS options like Moodle, which are easy to use and highly customizable, there's no reason to pay for an expensive LMS. Mark shared that not only is Moodle widely used by corporations (this is backed up by a recent study by The eLearning Guild), but it's also used by the US military because the military finds it more secure to control their LMS themselves, rather than relying on a proprietary LMS.
4. Design e-learning like a magazine. Rather than forcing all learners into a linear experience, design e-learning that can be explored the way that readers explore magazines. Allow for browsing, provide a menu, and create an attractive look and feel that encourages voluntary exploration.
5. Have consultants hand off e-learning that's not finished. Some Kineo clients have found that they prefer to do the last-minute changes themselves, so Kineo has handed off e-learning that's almost finished, but not quite. The company creates e-learning that's easy for clients to edit themselves, which lets clients change their minds about the final wording as many times as they like because they control the content themselves.
6. Get the bloat out of the design process. Skip the 30-page design document, and go right to the mock-up. Better yet, start creating concrete designs during a meeting rather than merely talking about hypothetical designs, so that everyone's on the same page.
Notes from Michael Molinaro's provocative ASTDNY presentation
At last night's ASTDNY meeting, Michael Molinaro, Corporate Vice President and Head of Leadership Development at New York Life Insurance Company, gave a presentation titled "One Last Time: What's the Deal with ROI?" In his presentation, he took on the much-hyped training industry focus on calculating return on investment (ROI). ROI is basically the amount of money earned by spending money.
Focusing on the trend of measuring ROI for soft skills training like executive coaching and leadership training, Molinaro gave three succinct reasons not to measure ROI:
1) You can't
2) You don't need to
3) You oughtn't want to
You can't measure ROI
Molinaro pointed out that current formulas for measuring ROI are basically guesses. The models all factor in a percentage weighting for how confident the person doing the calculations is in the validity of the rest of the formula, which essentially invalidates the entire calculation because it's never close to 100%. After all, what CEO would bother with an accounting figure that the accountant believes is only 65% accurate?
You don't need to measure ROI
Molinaro stated that there is no point in going to ridiculous lengths to come up with a mythical ROI number when there is a wealth of research that backs up the value of developing employees. If the point of ROI is to justify the need to spend budget money on training, then the existing data already meets that need. He suggested that a better use of time and resources is to focus on linking training to organizational strategies and goals.
If you need hard data about the value of training and developing employees, he referenced the following three studies:
- Laurie Bassi, Paul Harrison, Jens Ludwig, and Daniel McMurrer (2004) published "The Impact of U.S. Firms' Investments in Human Capital on Stock Prices," which discussed their research finding that companies that spend more on training perform better in the stock market.
- Bruce Pfau and Ira Kay (2002) published The Human Capital Edge: 21 People Management Practices Your Company Must Implement (or Avoid) to Maximize Shareholder Value, which discussed their study of over 750 companies which found that companies with effective human resources practices can increase their shareholder value by 47% more than companies without effective human resources practices.
- Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (1999) published First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, which distilled information from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by the Gallup Organization and found that good management is the key to strong organizational performance.
You oughtn't want to measure ROI
Molinaro said that it's demeaning to try to put dollar figures on the work of a field like learning and development, which is a field primarily focused on human beings rather than numbers. He urged the attendees to have the courage to believe that because this field involves different work than businesspeople' s jobs, we should be held accountable in different ways.
A final note
Lance Tukell, Director of Global Training & Development at Chartis and next year's ASTDNY chapter president, suggested that an alternative to calculating ROI is to ask at the start of a project: "What is success to you? What do you need to see?" This will result in much more useful information about how a training project will add value to a company.
The article's downloadable at http://online-journals.org/i-jac/article/view/975, and here's the abstract: "BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) is a nonprofit organization offering academic tutoring to elementary school children from low-income, urban communities. BELL launched a blended learning training for the tutoring staff working in its summer program in 2008, and won Training Magazine’s Blended Learning and Performance Project of the Year. The e-learning from that blended learning training is discussed in this paper."
Tonight's ASTDNY special interest group (SIG) for training directors was a roundtable discussion comparing leadership development strategies and processes. Moderated by new SIG Chair Jim O'Hern, the Director of Learning and Development at Hess Corporation, the group discussed our experiences with leadership training programs.
As part of the discussion, participants shared a number of recommended books. If you're interested in your own leadership development, or are creating leadership training, you may want to take a look at these books, which include useful tools, exercises, and ideas:
* Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman
* FYI: For Your Improvement, A Guide for Development and Coaching by Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger
* Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars
* StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath
* What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
* Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations by Dannemiller Tyson Associates
Changing a culture and being part of a movement
Sam Quiah is a Senior Consultant at Development Without Limits. He agreed to an interview after we met via the Johns Hopkins University National Center for Summer Learning's virtual conference. (See my prior blog post "An experiment in live online training" for more info about that conference.) We facilitated back-to-back virtual workshops, and after seeing the great job he did leading his workshop “Go Global! Building Global Literacy During Afterschool and Summer,” I was interested in learning more about his experiences as a trainer. When we talked, it turned out that we’d gone through the same social work program at Columbia University – it can be a small world in NYC nonprofits.
Sam’s path to becoming a trainer
Sam got into training after graduate school, when he began running Global Kids programs in high schools. While working as a Site Coordinator, he facilitated trainings on global literacy, community service, and other general topics, and he discovered that he enjoyed training. So, he took on a Saturday consulting job with Development Without Limits, training both educators and older youth working with younger youth. After two years working two jobs, Sam decided to take the leap to freelancing full time, and so he started his current role as Senior Consultant.
Sam was drawn to a career in training and consulting because he likes the challenge of working with a diverse mix of agencies. He’s motivated by the big picture impact of being able to strengthen the field of youth development by strengthening its organizations. “I like the idea of changing a culture and being a part of a movement,” he says.
He also enjoys the opportunity to bolster organizations by applying the expertise developed over his career, which has included roles with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Youth Unit of the United Nations Division for Social Policy and Development, and South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!).
What it means to be a trainer at his organization
Sam has a varied schedule, primarily working from home or at a client site, and sometimes going to the Development Without Limits office for meetings or collaborative work. The clients he serves are both NYC-based and located around the country. In addition to leading trainings, Sam provides technical assistance to clients. His work is project-based, and he likes the satisfaction of making targeted measurable contributions on a limited time frame.
Development Without Limits’s mission is to provide dynamic and challenging learning experiences for young people and adults. The organization facilitates ready-made workshops, creates customized trainings, writes curricula, and partners with organizations on special projects. This means that Sam’s job is never the same from project to project.
New consultant trainers generally join the team via referrals rather than via resume submissions; because the organization has specific values and high standards, they prefer it when someone they trust can vouch that a potential trainer will be a good fit.
The future
One project Sam's excited about is producing afterschool curricula for various youth organizations to implement with their staff and participants.
In love with educating educators
Alejandra Kennedy is a National Training Specialist at BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life). I decided to profile her first because I know that Alex is an excellent trainer, having worked together for four years at my prior job, and she absolutely loves training. We co-facilitated a workshop together for YNPN a couple weeks ago, and it was a pleasure to see her train both because she’s so good and because she actually lights up from the joy of giving workshops.
Alex’s path to becoming a trainer
Alex originally wanted to be a teacher, and she began her work at BELL as an academic tutor while she was in college. Soon after starting this job, she began to work with the training department as well, and she eventually had her first opportunity to train.
“I fell in love with educating educators,” she says. “I felt like I was changing lives by helping develop teachers and tutors to work with underprivileged scholars. I also love how engaged people are in BELL’s mission and goals, and how the structure of training here supports that.” BELL is a nonprofit whose mission is to enhance the educational achievements, self-esteem, and life opportunities of elementary school children living in low-income, urban communities, and the children served are called scholars.
What it means to be a trainer at her organization
Alex is based in BELL’s Bronx office, but she travels to all BELL regions to deliver training to the educators and leaders who run BELL’s academic summer and after school programs. She also facilitates live virtual webinars, and she has contributed to the development of BELL’s e-learning training. She writes workshops and creates training materials, including participant workbooks, leader’s guides, and workshop slides. On the logistical side, she has project managed training nationally, and she has run training events with up to 200 participants in eight classrooms.
At BELL, the training team is organized under the program department, along with the education and assessment/evaluation teams. The focus is on making sure that BELL scholars receive the best possible service, and training topics include general topics such as behavior management, child development, cultural awareness, and team building, and organization-sp ecific topics such as how to implement the literacy and math curricula.
Any educator who has worked with the organization is eligible to apply as a per diem trainer. Alex then screens resumes, interviews candidates, rates their sample presentations, and conducts an eight-hour train-the-train er for candidates who make it through the rigorous process. She provides ongoing feedback and coaching as well.
The future
“One project I'm excited about is the launch of a new training series to provide extra support to struggling staff through shorter, more intense in-service options.”
As for the future of training, Alex predicts that technology is going to become even more important, with virtual classrooms and e-learning bringing training to more people, using fewer resources. “Bottom line: even in difficult economic times, the field of training is safe!”
A new feature of this blog
Nonprofit trainers come from such different backgrounds and do such different day-to-day work that I thought it would be fascinating to learn about the stories of some of our NYC colleagues.
So, this will be a new topic that I’ll include on this blog from time to time – I’ll profile trainers from a range of backgrounds who serve a range of clients. I hope this will be an interesting exploration of what it means to be a trainer, and a nice recognition of our peers’ hard work.
When designing training for adult learners, referencing Bernice McCarthy's 4MAT system can help you ensure that you are considering the needs of all learners.
The 4MAT model describes four types of learners
1. Imaginative learners who want answers to the question "why?" These learners need to understand the big picture reasons for learning particular content, and they also want to understand the usefulness of particular information for their personal experience. They are driven by feeling, watching, and personal involvement.
2. Analytic learners who want answers to the question "what?" These learners want to understand the details of concepts and processes, and they enjoy hearing from the experts. They are driven by listening, thinking, and fact-seeking.
3. Common sense learners who want answers to the question "how?" These learners want to learn by doing, and they need to try things out themselves to figure them out. They are driven by creating, tinkering, and experimenting.
4. Dynamic learners who want answers to the question "if?" These learners are independent and enjoy self-discovery, using their intuition and exploration of hidden possibilities. They are driven by feeling and doing.
Training should include elements that appeal to all four types of learners
McCarthy's model suggests going through the four types in order, so that training begins by addressing the big picture and connecting learners to the training content. Next, training should cover the basics of the topic, and then it should cover how to build the learners' skills in using the new concepts. Finally, training should consider "what if" scenarios and adaptations to the content that may be needed in a particular situation.
More information about 4MAT is available at www.aboutlearning.com, and the website also includes free resources such as a complete visual explanation of the 4MAT system, access to webinars, a monthly newsletter, and McCarthy's blog & Twitter feed.
You can keep up with training news & ideas during your commute or workout
My fellow NY subway commuters may be able to relate to the scenario of subway cars so full that you can't possibly hold a book up to your face to read. Lately I've turned to podcasts as a way to feel productive during commutes like these, and I thought you might be interested in three free podcasts that can help you build your training expertise.
The following podcasts are available on iTunes and are updated monthly:
ASTD T+D Podcasts. These feature ASTD staff reading feature articles from T+D Magazine & are also available at astd.org if you prefer not to use iTunes. ASTD is the American Society for Training & Development, a professional organization for those in the learning and performance field.
ASTD LX Briefing Podcasts. These feature ASTD staff reading feature articles from Learning Executive Magazine and are also available at astd.org.
The Workforce Innovations Podcast. This is put out by Learn.com, which is a large corporation that sells training and other products, so there are inevitable product plugs and a corporate perspective, but the ideas discussed are still relevant to trainers. The podcast is more energetic than the ASTD ones and therefore can be more interesting to listen to, because there are two hosts having conversations rather than one person reading articles.
Next Friday evening, September 25th, I'll be co-facilitating a workshop with Alejandra Kennedy on Managing Up, for the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. Alex and I are doing this on a volunteer basis, so the workshop is the bargain price of . The event will start off with networking time to provide the opportunity to meet other nonprofit folks.
From the event description at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/431349177 or http://tinyurl.com/l3fmus
"Developing a good relationship with your supervisors is essential to making sure that you stand out in a positive way, especially during these difficult economic times. By actively working toward a close, professional relationship with your managers, you are not only serving your best interests, but the interests of your supervisor, the entire organization, and your clients. Those who master the art of managing up are able to acquire the resources they need in order to become more effective and successful at work. Join this important workshop to learn from experts in the professional management field about how you can build a healthy and productive relationship with your managers and thus improve your overall work performance. Space is limited. Please RSVP early."
I hope to see you there!
Notes from the opening session of The eLearning Guild's online forum on Instructional Design
The eLearning Guild's online forum on Best Practices in e-Learning Instructional Design and Management opened today with a session by Patti Shank, President of Learning Peaks, titled "Boredom-proofin g Learning Content: Tips for Making Learning Content Compelling."
Shank presented a useful (and not boring) session, offering five overarching design techniques for keeping learners engaged:
1. Focus on making a great first impression. If learning content doesn't look interesting from the first moment, the learner will be inclined to believe that it's boring before they even get started and will begin to tune out immediately. Just as first impressions are important in life, they are important in learning.
2. Design the content so that it gets noticed. People are wired to notice content that is vivid, unusual, unexpected, or emotionally charged, so learning content should include these characteristics.
3. Promote your learners' curiosity. An easy way to do this is to ask questions or be provocative.
4. Reduce the amount of telling. Make the learning meaningful by challenging learners to analyze, compare, practice, and otherwise think for themselves.
5. Use humor.
For more info about the forum, you can go here: http://bit.ly/mEnNV.
Last month, I left my position as director of training at Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) to become director of content development for professional services at Wireless Generation. I had been at BELL for almost five years, and am grateful for the privilege of having spent that time working with so many amazing people for such an important mission: to enhance the educational achievements, self-esteem, and life opportunities of elementary school children living in low-income, urban communities. I'll miss BELL greatly, and I wish the organization the best.
Three weeks into my new role at Wireless Generation, I'm thrilled to have joined the organization and am delighted to be contributing to its work -- the company creates innovative tools, systems, and services that help educators teach smarter, and currently serves more than 200,000 educators and 3 million students.
Best Practices in e-Learning Instructional Design and Management
For folks interested in learning more about e-learning, The eLearning Guild is presenting an online forum next Thursday and Friday focused on design and management. Zora Rizzi and I will be presenting one of the sessions, on Friday, September 11 from 1:15pm to 2:30pm; our session is called "Blended & Interactive Design on a Limited Budget."
Here's some info about the forum from The eLearning Guild website:
"This Online Forum focuses on best practices and strategies for e-Learning instructional design, and the management of your ID teams and processes. We have asked the top ranked speakers who presented sessions at our two recent Regional Instructional Design Symposiums to present their sessions again for this Online Forum. To facilitate your planning, we have organized the sessions into two “tracks,” one focused on strategies for managing teams and processes, and the other on practical and proven ID approaches."
Forum info is available at
http://bit.ly/mEnNV
Designing Learning for the “Moment of Need”
Bob Mosher, LearningGuide Solutions USA
Mosher talked about creating a "holistic learning ecosystem" that helps people at each moment of need for learning. He suggested that there are five such moments of need: 1) the first time we learn something, 2) when we want to learn more, 3) when we try to remember or apply learning, 4) when things change, and 5) when something goes wrong. As trainers, we need to create support for staff that's appropriate for each stage, and Mosher suggested that e-learning can be useful for the first two types of moments, whereas just-in-time performance supports are more useful for the last three.
The learning ecosystem needs to include guidance for learners on what to access and when, because Mosher noted that research shows that 80% of adults make poor choices when given choices in their learning -- we tend to choose based on what's shortest, shiniest, etc., rather than on what will actually help us perform.
E-Learning on the Cheap! Finding Resources for Free (or Virtually Free)
Steven Yacovelli, TopDog Learning Group, LLC
Yacovelli made the point that e-learning doesn't need to be expensive to be good, as long as it's designed well. As he said, "cheap does not equal low quality." Without necessarily endorsing any products, he and the group shared many free resources, including Audacity and Wavepad for creating audio recordings, Moodle and Sakai for managing e-learning content much like an LMS, Udutu for building SCORM objects online, Wink or Camstudio for doing video screen captures, Guttenberg Press for books that are out of print, Stockvault for graphics, Comicpics or Toondoo for creating comics, and Drupal or Joomla for web authoring.
He also said that his company has a paper measurement that can help benchmark attitudes about e-learning before a project begins, which can be used to measure the project's success -- and they will share the measurement for free if the user agrees to share the data collected.
Blended and Interactive Design on a Nonprofit Budget
Matthea Marquart & Zora Rizzi, BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life)
Day 2 of the symposium was the day when Zora and I led a session, which provided lessons learned from BELL's e-learning project. It was a delight to present our project to e-learning professionals, and it was a thrill to receive positive feedback. If you're interested in checking out some of what we shared, our handouts are available at http://www.elearningguild.com/showFile.cfm?id=3495
Closing General Session – Panel
Panelists: Lee Maxey, MINDMAX, Inc.
Bob Mosher, LearningGuide Solutions
Marc Rosenberg, Marc Rosenberg and Associates
Allison Rossett, Department of Educational Technology, San Diego State University
Will Thalheimer, Work-Learning Research
Ellen Wagner, Sage Road Solutions, LLC
Moderator: Heidi Fisk, The eLearning Guild
Here are some highlights of the panel's responses to questions from symposium participants.
In response to the question of the top three things a new e-learning manager should do, Will Thalheimer said that the new manager should prioritize evaluation, learn to be a good leader of many different types of people, and maintain a sense of humor; Lee Maxey said that the new manager should read The First 90 Days, determine success measures, and get a coach that will help the manager be accountable.
In response to the question of what organizations should consider when selecting an LMS or CMS (learning management system or content management system), Marc Rosenberg said that the LMS doesn't really matter because well designed, relevant e-learning content is the key and LMS's can become a roadblock when they control what type of e-learning is produced in order to fit the LMS's limited capabilities; Lee Maxey said that it's not important to have a perfect LMS because there are many web-enabled services you can tack on as long as you get an LMS with 80% of what you need; Will Thalheimer cautioned that having an overly fancy LMS can send the message that training is separate from work if the training becomes more about the LMS than the job.
In response to the question of what kind of interactivity multiple generations need, Allison Rossett said that everyone needs interaction, so we should assume that certain generations don't need to be engaged; Will Thalheimer noted e-learning should engage people to the point that they stop multi-tasking, because research has clearly demonstrated that multitasking doesn't work and that what happens is that people jump from one task to another without focusing on anything and therefore do everything worse.
In response to what books e-learning professionals should read, the panel recommended Ruth Clark on design and e-learning, Jackie Fenn on managing the technology hype cycle, John Kotter on leading change, and Chip & Dan Heath on making ideas stick.
Event info at http://www.elearningguild.com/content.cfm?selection=doc.1222
The eLearning Guild's Instructional Design Symposium on July 23 and 24 was excellent, and the highlights from my favorite sessions from Day 1 are below.
Mastering e-Learning Instructional Design in the 21st Century
With Brent Schlenker, The eLearning Guild
Schelnker gave a fantastic keynote address. One good quote was "clicking buttons in an elevator is not interactive, but we're told that clicking the 'next' button in an e-learning is." He pushed participants to do better with interactivity, and he suggested that at this point in technological advances, e-learning content should be searchable, editable, linkable, tagg-able, and feed-able. Another good quote was one he referenced by Plato: "You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation." He tied this to Ralph Koster's book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, which posits that with games, learning is the drug -- he suggested that e-learning should be designed to be just as effective at teaching as games.
He also referenced John Medina's book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and pushed participants to remember that brains need repetition, stimulation of the senses, and exploration of patterns in order to learn, so we need to build these into e-learning.
Beyond Kirkpatrick: Taking a Fresh Look at Analysis and Evaluation
Allison Rossett, San Diego State University
Rossett pushed participants to incorporate evidence into our e-learning practice -- both anecdotal evidence and metrics. She said that the data we collect in order to evaluate our e-learning should serve three broad purposes -- to plan, to report, and to improve.
Rossett quoted Abraham Lincoln -- "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax" -- to make the point that e-learning professionals should spend the majority of our time on analysis and evaluation. Her tips to make this feasible included baking in the metrics so that the e-learning is being evaluated throughout rather than just at the end, focusing only on gathering data that's actionable, and prioritizing the purposes of any project so that even with limited time and resources the project can be successful. To quote Rossett, "You can only judge success when you and those you serve have agreed on purposes."
Situation-based Learning Design: Research Insights for e-Learning
Will Thalheimer, Work-Learning Research
To increase long-term memory of what's learned in e-learning, Thalheimer said that e-learning content must be aligned with context, must include practice retrieving information from one's memory, and should be repeated over time. Situation-based learning design focuses on the first two. Content-context alignment can be achieved by matching the e-learning with the workplace in as many ways as possible, including background and incident, as well as look, feel, sounds, mood, space, etc. When designers cannot create a match, the next best strategy is to create many contexts, which also aids in memory retrieval. Regarding practice, research shows that even tests are helpful, especially if they include feedback.
When designing situation-based learning rather than topic-based learning, Thalheimer recommended considering the magic question -- "What do we want our learners to be able to do, and in what situations do we want our learners to do these things?" The answers to that question should guide designers in creating relevant e-learning. To do this, Thalheimer discussed the SEDA conceptualizati on of how people approach situations -- Situation, Evaluation, Decision, Action -- and noted that situation-based learning should include all of these phases.
Tomorrow, Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 1:00pm EST, my colleague Zora Rizzi and I will be co-facilitating a free webinar for InSync Training (for information about the company, please see my prior post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online").
The webinar is called "Turning Classroom Training into Interactive, Cost-Effective, Asynchronous E-learning on a Moodle Platform," and here is the session description from the website:
Are you wondering how other organizations are designing cost-effective, interactive e-learning on Moodle? Do you need to cut training costs by converting classroom training into e-learning? Would you like to see some examples that spark your own ideas? BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) launched a new self-paced, asynchronous e-learning program in 2008 that cut our classroom training in half by replacing much of it with prerequisite e-learning modules. BELL’s e-learning sits on a Moodle platform, and much of the e-learning creation is done in-house. Zora Jones Rizzi and Matthea Marquart of BELL’s Training team will share the project’s challenges, solutions, results, and lessons learned. Many of the challenges that BELL faced in designing and launching our e-learning are universal, and learning about them may help you with your own work.
Registration is free if you'd like to attend, and a free recording will also be available afterwards. Here's the website to register:
https://insync.webex.com/tc0500l/trainingcenter/register/registerSession.do?siteurl=insync&backUrl=/tc0500l/trainingcenter/webcom/calendar.do%3Fsiteurl%3Dinsync&confID=562385683
or http://tinyurl.com/nboeev
1. Navigate to https://insync.webex.com
2. Click on "Recorded sessions”
3. Locate “Turning Classroom Training into Interactive, Cost-Effective, Asynchronous E-learning on a Moodle Platform-July 30th ”
4. There is no password required
5. Click the Playback button to the right of the title
I’m glad to be back blogging after a hiatus during the busy season of my work year at BELL. Since my last post, I’ve been away on five trips, and on a personal note, I also had the chance to meet my adorable newborn niece. During the time I’ve been away, I've had the chance to learn quite a bit during various learning events, so my next few posts will be playing a bit of catch-up so I can share some tips and lessons with you.
For those who couldn't make it to the conference, I thought you'd be interested in notes on my three favorite sessions of the day.
Using technology to transform teaching vs. to extend teaching
Anders I. Morch of the University of Oslo, Norway presented "Teacher Perspectives on Learning with Mobile Technologies," which compared the results of introducing PDAs for students into classrooms in two different schools. At one school, the teachers used the PDAs for traditional activities such as having students type lists of vocabulary words. This was an example of extending traditional teaching practices onto new technology. At the other school, the teachers transformed their teaching by using the PDAs to have students create concept maps, animations, and visualizations of learning. Morch suggested that e-learning practitioners consider whether we are using technology to transform the way we train, or just extending old methods onto new technology without considering the possibilities.
Video-based role-plays
Patrick Blum of inside Business Group, Germany presented "Interactive, Dynamic Video-Based Training in Corporate Learning," in which he demonstrated video-based branching scenarios, or conversation trees, that offered realistic skills practice. The video-based e-learning simulated a conversation between a customer and the learner, with video of a customer talking and reacting to decisions made by the learner. It was used to replace live role-plays during classroom training, and offers a solution to organizations that would like to give staff the opportunity to practice live conversations, with standardized step-by-step feedback, without deploying a legion of classroom trainers.
Turning factual knowledge into practical, applicable training that prepares students for the real world
Tucker Harding of Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning presented "Intelligent Simulation Technology for Training Humanitarian Practitioners," in which he demonstrated a case study/simulation hybrid in which learners make political decisions about a theoretical Country X. The demonstration was created to help students apply classroom learning to realistic situations, and he noted that the Center's website at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu offers access to their project portfolio, where you can see how they've used technology in purposeful ways on 200 projects in order to improve education.
Today was also the day that Zora and I did our presentation, which was a lot of fun. We were excited to show BELL's e-learning to experts in the field, and it was interesting to hear the questions and feedback from the e-learning community.
Today's keynote address was given by Dr. Allison Rossett of San Diego State University and was titled "E-learning is What?" Rossett shared her thoughts about good e-learning design and the future of e-learning, and I thought you'd be interested in three of her quotes:
"Consider designing training that's just-in-time, not just-in-case."
Rossett suggested that training shouldn't include every possible piece of information that learners might possibly need, but rather provide information that learners will use. One way to move overly detailed information out of training is to create performance supports that provide information right when staff members need it. An example of this concept is the Coast Guard, which used to train their staff on every single type of boat and what to do when each type of boat was encountered, even when it was likely that staff would only encounter certain boats once in their careers, if ever; they replaced much of that training by creating palm pilot devices where staff can look up boats as needed on the job.
"Training should move material to the mind, heart, and belly."
Rossett pointed out that the best training changes the brain so that the brain has new knowledge to access and use, while at the same time convincing people's emotions and guts to actually use that new knowledge.
"Trainers need to be fluent with technology, but skeptical."
Rossett said that trainers need to keep up with new technology, but also look at it with a critical eye rather than jumping to use every new type of technology that comes out. We should remember that training needs to be effective, rather than just flashy.
Another highlight
Another highlight of the day was Hal Christensen's session on electronic performance supports, in which he demonstrated two examples of just-in-time supports and passionately argued that if training provides information that learners may never use or will use so long after the training that they're likely to forget it, that particular training doesn't have much value. His top quote was "aim to change the performance, not the performer," meaning that organizations should aim to make the workplace smarter by making it easier for people to do their jobs well. He argued that performance supports are a key way to do that.
ICELW workshop demonstrating BELL's e-learning
Next Thursday, June 11, I'll be co-presenting the workshop "Demonstrating the E-learning Component of Training Magazine’s Blended Learning & Performance Project of the Year" at the International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace, with Zora Jones Rizzi, BELL's National E-learning Specialist. Our workshop will be from 5:00-6:00 p.m, and I'll also be chairing session 6D on Friday from 2:00-4:30 p.m.
The conference will be held at Teacher's College, Columbia University, and will feature speakers from 27 countries, including both researchers who focus on online learning and practitioners who implement e-learning at their organizations. One of the key goals mentioned on the conference website - www.icelw.org - is "to improve online learning so that it makes a measurable difference in workplace performance and morale."
There's still time to register, and if you're planning on being there, I hope you'll say hi!
Trainers can use emerging web-based resources to create cost-effective, high quality training
For those of us looking for free ways to professionally develop our organizations' staff, it may be worthwhile to access free video, audio, lecture notes, lab demonstrations, and exams from university classes and events.
YouTube Edu
YouTube Edu, available at www.youtube.com/edu, offers videos and channels from their college and university partners. Examples of these partners include Columbia Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership, and trainers could use video from either of these partners as a training tool to develop staff's business and leadership skills.
iTunes U
iTunes U offers over 75,000 recordings of commencement speeches, lectures, classes, lab demonstrations, and more, accessible through the iTunes store. Colleges and universities such as Stanford, Oxford, and Emory have set up sites, as have museums, PBS stations, and other educational organizations such as the NY Public Library. Trainers could use the podcasts available here as prerequisite assignments to prepare staff for particular workshops, to deepen staff's expertise on subjects relevant to the organization's mission, or to provoke thoughtful and informed discussion.
Individual Universities
Other universities have chosen to create their own websites with free resources; UC Berkeley and MIT are prominent examples. UC Berkeley's http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ offers video and audio podcasts from a wide variety of lectures and events, and MIT's Open Courseware at http://ocw.mit.edu offers free lecture notes, class materials, exams, and videos from 1,900 courses, with no registration required. For example, MIT's Sloan School of Management offers class materials for both undergraduate and graduate-level course, and trainers could use the wealth of case studies, assignments, self-evaluation s, and more to create workshop activities with the credibility of coming from a world class business school.
A tool to examine problems, identify manager expectations, and consider issues
Jane Bozarth of www.bozarthzone.com facilitated another free lunchtime webinar today, titled "BozarthZone! Instructional Design for the Real World," with technical assistance from Kassy LaBorie of www.insynctraining.com. (See my prior blog post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online" for info about these webinars.)
Bozarth offered practical tips for training design, and one lesson in particular stood out -- the fact that coworkers sometimes come to trainers with intense emotions like anger, frustration, desperation, avoidance, or hope. We hear "everyone needs training on X right away," "things would be so much better if everyone just knew how to X," or "please help me get my staff to X because I've tried everything and they just won't do it."
In order to deal with an emotional request for help, trainers need to respond with a systematic analysis of the problem and how to solve it. We need to listen, ask good questions, identify the actual business challenge underneath any emotional complaints, and help ease our coworkers' emotions by finding effective solutions to the challenge even when the appropriate solution is not training.
Bozarth suggested using a tool to help with this systematic analysis -- a list of "Twenty Questions You Should Always Ask Before Starting Any Training Program," created by Dr. Nanette Miner. Bozarth included the tool in her latest book From Analysis to Evaluation: Ready-to-Use Tools to Make Training More Effective, and it's downloadable as two of the pages here: http://tinyurl.com/qhgj73.
Tonight's ASTDNY monthly chapter event featured a panel of representatives from five college-based continuing education programs and one government agency that provides funding for training, the NYC Small Business Services Division.
The top two takeaways for nonprofit trainers from tonight's panel:
1. Our local community colleges are cost-effective resources for providing training
2. Government funding may be available to subsidize the cost of new training projects
Local community colleges as training resources
CUNY colleges such as BMCC, LaGuardia, and Baruch provide continuing education classes, graduate certificates, and customized training to tens of thousands of workers every year. It can be a cost-effective option to provide professional development to your staff through a community college rather than spending the money to develop training internally from scratch, often for only a handful of people.
Government funding to subsidize training
NYC's Small Business Services Division has a competitive application for grants of up to 0,000 to subsidize 60% of training costs for new training projects.
The reason the city offers these grants is to positively impact NYC's economy by developing our workforce, strengthening our businesses, and attracting local customers for local businesses to keep money within the city. Therefore, it can be difficult for nonprofits to make it past the eligibility screening for these grants, which are highly competitive (out of 150-200 applications, 8-10 projects are funded), because nonprofits are generally not focused on activities that bring new revenue into NYC. However, if your nonprofit is eligible, the grant can be significant.
Other application evaluation criteria include a clear business need with expected profitability gains, likelihood that the training will meet that need effectively, impact on low-income New Yorkers, trainee wage increases that will be attributable to the training, measurable proof that the training will upgrade the trainees' transferrable skills, and a reasonable budget with a strong cost-benefit analysis. Grants are not available for mandated training that organizations must provide, nor are they available for training specific to particular organizations, such as employee orientation.
If you are interested in learning more, the application is available at www.nyc.gov/training
The panel
The panel was introduced by Lance Tukell, ASTDNY's President-Elect, and moderated by James O'Hern, Corporate Director of Learning, HESS Corporation.
Panelists included:
- Tom Abogabal, Director of Client Services, eCornell
- Patrick Dail, Director, Continuing Education & Training, Borough of Manhattan Community College
- Ann Kelly, Director of Corporate Relations, Harvard Business Publishing
- Stephanie Robinson, Director of Corporate Relations, Stevens Institute of Technology
- Timothy Rucinski, Director, Center for Corporate Education, LaGuardia Community College
- Sara Schlossberg, Director of Training, Small Business Services Division, New York City
(See my prior blog post "The Value of Joining a Professional Training Association" for more information about ASTDNY.)
Thanks for the recap of the event. I also wanted to share that eCornell is a cost - effective resource to provide professional development to staff in the non-profit sector. We are used by many non-profits such as YMCA, March of Dimes, UN Development Program, UN Population Fund, UNICEF, LINGOs as a means to effectively train staff in a cost-effective, scalable and consistent manner. For organizations like the YMCA and UN family, it can be very expensive to develop courses, workshops and then have people travel to participate in the handful of times it is offered. Doing it online through eCornell is even more cost-effective than face to face at Cornell. Our cost per learner is less than per training hour. In a non-profit, where the mission, fundraising, day to day operations all take precedence over training, the ability to minimize disruption and enhance speed to performance is essential.
Building from scratch is a losing proposition which is another reason our non-profit partners come to eCornell. We've developed custom courses around Form 990 (1 hour course) and "Training Others" (4 hour course) for YMCA taking existing face to face workshop material and putting it into online courses that are immediately accessible on demand to the entire movement. No travel, No expense, No Time Away from Chapter, No Waiting for The Instructor to Come to the Chapter, No waiting for the training session to be offered... The UNDP only had a few facilitators for a few HR workshops, we took their workshop content and plopped it into our course model. Now all 166 Country Offices and the entire global HR Team can leverage these courses instead of waiting for the workshop and trying to get one the few available slots to travel thousands of miles to take the course.
Thank you for posting this great information! I appreciate the useful details you've provided. Sounds like you're doing exciting work.
On Wednesday, May 20, from 11 - 11:50 a.m. EST, I'll be co-facilitating a live virtual workshop session as part of an online training hosted by the National Center for Summer Learning, which is based at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. BELL Senior Site Manager Ameenah Reed and I will facilitate "The Buzz on Behavior: Positive & Practical Behavior Management Strategies for Summer Programs."
This daylong online training is a first for the National Center for Summer Learning, and it's exciting to be a part of it. The online conferencing platform used will be Adobe Connect, and there is room for up to 200 participants, who will interact via chat, polls, and emoticons. This is a new format for me, as I'm more accustomed to using WebEx Training Center for groups of up to 40 people, who interact in various ways. I look forward to letting you know how it goes.
If you're interested in trying out a virtual training like this one, registration includes a full-day online training for summer program staff, as well as one year's access to a recording of the training. Information is available here:
http://www.summerlearning.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=241&Itemid=750, and this smaller url will take you to the same website: http://tinyurl.com/dnyj43.
Training magazines offer free online editions
In a knowledge economy like ours, it's vital to stay on top of the latest information. A free way to do this in the training field is to read the online editions of training magazines, which generally contain profiles, case studies, news, opinions, and instructional information.
Here are five training magazines and their websites:
* T+D Magazine: www.astd.org/TD
* Training Magazine: www.trainingmag.com
* Chief Learning Officer Magazine: www.clomedia.com
* Talent Management: www.talentmgt.com
* Workforce Management: www.workforce.com
"It doesn't matter what people know -- it matters what they do and say."
Last week I attended a free lunchtime webinar hosted by Chief Learning Officer magazine (www.clomedia.com). The presenters were from respected e-learning provider Allen Interactions: Scott Colehour, solutions architect and co-founder, and R. John Welsh, Jr., vice president.
The webinar was called "Performance Learning Filter: Are Your Learning Designs Increasing Organizational Performance?"
Performance-bas ed E-learning
Colehour and Welsh presented a filter for evaluating e-learning design that they called CCAF -- Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback. Context refers to the framework for the e-learning, which should be relevant to the learner's workplace and job; challenge refers to a stimulus to take action within the given context; activity refers to the action taken to solve the challenge; and feedback refers to letting the learner know when they make mistakes and when they are correct.
When an e-learning incorporates all the elements of CCAF, it moves past simply making the learners aware of information, to actually changing their behavior. This is key, as the presenters' statement at the beginning of this post suggests.
The bottom line: e-learning that simply makes staff aware of information doesn't necessarily translate into improved service for our clients. To make a difference, we need to create e-learning that changes employee performance by helping them master the skills that will help them improve our clients' lives.
See for Yourself
If you'd like to see the webinar for yourself, the free recording and powerpoints are available at the links below. (Note: sometimes the blogging software adds spaces, so if you try the link and it doesn't work, just delete any extra spaces.)
* Recording: http://www.webex.com/web-seminars/view_recording/660672486?sid=CLO042309rec
* PowerPoints: http://try.webex.com/meet/pdfs/CLO_042409.pdf
Thank you for your post and for sharing this link to your demos. I encourage folks to check them out; the check-cashing one in particular is a favorite of mine.
Cautionary tales of terrible training taken to the extreme
Knowing that I love to hear about training, my Dad saves his training stories for me. In the past few years, he's had some doozies to share, and I'm offering three of them to you as cautionary tales about the importance of logistics, quality trainers, and preparation.
Space matters
At one training my Dad attended, the organization needed to train over 100 people. They separated everyone into four smaller groups with their own trainer, and that's where the good decisions stopped.
Rather than put each group into their own breakout room, the organization decided to put everyone in one giant room. They put a trainer in each corner, pointed the chairs at the four different corners, and began training everyone at the same time. No one could hear their particular trainer, so they began side conversations that lasted the full day.
My Dad's comment: "It was as if someone had forgotten to book an appropriate space, so they crossed their fingers and decided to just go ahead without making any changes to the plan."
Late start
On another training day, my Dad and his colleagues showed up to the training location on time. Staff from the organization were there as well, and the space was set up for the training. The only thing missing was the trainer.
The group waited for hours, and around lunchtime, the staff called headquarters. It turned out that the trainer had quit that morning, and no one had remembered to contact the staff at the training event. Everyone was sent home and the training was canceled.
My Dad's comment: "I guess no one thought to send someone else to do the workshop, or maybe the workshop wasn't written down anywhere. But if it was going to be off the top of the trainer's head, we probably didn't miss much anyway."
Unprepared trainer
At another training, the trainer shared that it was his first time ever facilitating a workshop. The organization had given the trainer a leader's guide, but unfortunately, no one had helped him prepare.
For five days, the trainer read straight from the leader's guide. It was his first time ever looking at the material, and he wasn't a fluent reader, so he didn't know which phrases, words, or even syllables to emphasize.
My Dad's comment: "Maybe the organization was trying to save money and they thought that it would be cheaper not to pay an experienced trainer or to pay the trainer for prep time. So instead, they paid a room full of people not to learn anything, and they paid for the inevitable mistakes the new staff made."
Do you have any stories to share? I'd love to hear them.
Thank you for your post! And good point.
CSL conference workshop on BELL's Summer '08 program and training in Springfield
This Friday, April 17, I'll be co-presenting the workshop "The Transition Summer: BELL/Springfield Public Schools Rising 9th Grades Staff Training And Program Design" at the National Conference on Summer Learning in Chicago, with BELL's Chief Strategy Officer Carole Prest. The workshop will be from 2:30-4:00pm.
During the interactive workshop, we'll share lessons learned from building a new summer learning program for 8th grade students at risk for repeating the grade, including processes and outcomes. I'll also discuss BELL's training and demo BELL's e-learning, which won Training Magazine's Blended Learning and Performance Project of the Year for 2008.
This conference is hosted annually by the National Center for Summer Learning, which is based at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. If you're planning on being there, I hope you'll attend our workshop and say hi!
Revisiting John P. Kotter's "What Leaders Really Do"
In Kotter's article (which I discussed in my prior blog post "Trainers as leaders and managers"), he says that effective leaders often have certain professional experiences in common, which suggests a formula that organizations can use to develop their staff into excellent leaders.
A three-step formula for creating leaders
1) Early in their careers, during their twenties and thirties, effective leaders typically have had the opportunity to face a significant challenge. This gives them the chance to attempt to truly lead, as well as to learn from the positives and negatives of the experience. This learning opportunity is an key ingredient in developing their leadership skills and perspectives. Thus, organizations that are serious about developing leaders provide challenging assignments to relatively young employees.
2) Effective leaders have also generally had the chance to break out of narrow career paths and broaden their knowledge and experiences. This happens through routes such as lateral career moves, early promotions to broad roles, assignments to special task forces, or serious management training courses. Again, organizations that want to develop leaders create these routes to broadening perspectives.
3) Effective leaders have strong networks of internal & external relationships. These networks are essential to successful leadership initiatives. Organizations can support this by offering opportunities to work on teams and build internal relationships, and they can support or encourage time spent on external networking opportunities.
Now is the time to develop leadership
This year, organizations do not have to search far for challenges to provide employees, whether early-career employees who would benefit from a first real leadership opportunity or more experienced employees who would benefit from a chance to broaden perspectives. Nonprofits can create opportunities to exercise leadership and build internal networks by setting up task forces on revenue-generat ion, cost cutting, quality assurance during budget cuts, and staff motivation and retention. In addition, because nonprofits need to collaborate and learn from each other in order to survive this moment in history, they can send employees to knowledge sharing events in the field, which offer networking opportunities and a subsequent chance to teach or lead the organization on what was learned.
How trainers can support the development of leaders
We nonprofit trainers can encourage our organizations to take advantage of the current opportunity to develop leaders. As trainers, we can build an organizational culture of continuing professional development and lifelong learning.
In the nonprofit field, we know that this is the time our communities need us the most. In the same way, as trainers, this is the time our organizations need our unique abilities the most.
Today I attended another excellent, free lunchtime webinar hosted by InSync Training (see my prior blog post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online" for info about these webinars). The co-facilitators were Jane Bozarth of www.bozarthzone.com and Kassy LaBorie of www.insynctraining.com, and the guest presenter was Wendy Hardman of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
The webinar was titled "BozarthZone! Games Synchronous Trainers Play with Kassy LaBorie". The facilitators argued that games are essential elements of webinar training because they break the ice, engage participants, help people think, support the transfer of learning, make the training memorable, and let the facilitators check the learners' comprehension. They shared the quote "games = seductive tests" (William Horton). They warn, however, that any games used in training must connect to the content and have a point -- random games or filler games just waste participants' time and frustrate them.
The facilitators and participants shared a few free resources for creating games and puzzles, which you might find useful in this age of doing more with less:
http://www.edhelper.com/puzzles.htm
http://itech.pjc.edu/html/powerpoint_resources.htm
http://www.quia.com/web (free with a 30-day trial, but /year after that)
http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducat ion.com/ (there is a CD-ROM for sale here, but you can also create puzzles for free online)
Three categories to keep in mind to make your training fabulous
During the workshop I presented on Friday morning at the NAA conference (see my prior blog post), we did a small group activity in which the groups considered two questions: 1) What makes a classroom training terrible?
2) What makes a classroom training incredibly fabulous?
The participants tackled the questions with zest, partly because they got to vent about some pet peeves. Their responses fit into three overall categories: space & logistics, the trainer’s skills, and the workshop design.
Space & logistics
A room that’s too noisy, too cold, or too hot can ruin a training. So can uncomfortable seating, poor lighting, and cramped space. Other logistics can also sabotage participants’ ability to learn at training, such as no parking, poor directions to classrooms, malfunctioning equipment, and no source of food or water.
Trainer skills
The trainer can make or break any workshop. A passionate, enthusiastic trainer can bring content to life, especially if the trainer treats participants with respect and has a good sense of humor. Participants appreciate positive feedback, a good tone of voice, and a comfortable atmosphere. They want the trainer to be aware of the learners at all times and immediately address any concerns. They also want the trainer to be prepared, to avoid reading from the materials, to start on time, and to end on time. When technical issues come up, they want the trainer to have a back-up plan so that the workshop doesn’t come to a sputtering end.
Workshop design
Participants are tired of lecture-based, long, boring workshops with either too much information or nothing participants can use. They want interaction, engagement, multimedia delivery, and hands-on learning that keeps people awake and meets the needs of multiple learning styles. They also want handouts or other takeaway resources that will help them on the job, and they want enough copies of the materials for everyone. They want relevant content, the opportunity to share best practices and work in small groups, and time for question-and-an swer. They wish the training title would match the workshop’s actual content. Finally, they would like their organizations and managers to follow up with them to help them apply their skills on the job.
I’ve run this activity before and gotten similar responses, which suggests that most people who attend classroom trainings can easily remember what makes workshops terrible or fabulous. Since those of us who run trainings also attend them, we probably know all this too. And yet terrible training still exists, and it happens frequently enough that this activity is always easy for participants to do.
So how does terrible training happen? That’s a tough one. Lack of time & resources certainly play a part, but surely there's more involved. We'll explore this question further in my future blog posts, and I welcome your thoughts.
NAA conference workshop demo-ing BELL e-learning
This Friday, April 3, I'll be presenting the workshop "High-Quality, Cost Effective Staff Training as a Driver of Outcomes: The BELL Experience" at the National Afterschool Association conference in New Orleans. The workshop will be from 9:00am-10:30am. As part of the interactive workshop, I'll discuss and demo BELL's e-learning, which won Training Magazine's Blended Learning and Performance Project of the Year for 2008.
If you're one of the 2,300 people expected at the conference and you're interested in learning more about cost-effective ways to implement e-learning, I hope you'll attend the workshop and say hi!
A panel of training and non-training senior managers shared their advice for training professionals & training departments at ASTDNY's Training Directors Special Interest Group on Tuesday.
The panelists were all from for-profit organizations, but two of their messages in particular were good takeaways for nonprofit trainers:
1. Be a strategic business partner for your organization
2. Market your results to enhance your credibility
Partnering with business functions to be a catalyst for positive change
As trainers, we are in a unique position to have a major impact on our organizations. The process of designing training requires that trainers understand both our organizations' big picture priorities and the details that will support our organizations' goals. This gives us a rare insight and therefore the opportunity to make an insightful difference.
For example, when we do needs assessments to uncover issues that could be solved by training, we also uncover other challenges that require non-training solutions (such as changing management policies, restructuring, improving internal processes, conducting research, etc.). When this happens we need to be proactive in proposing solutions to management, even if they challenge the status quo, so that we become true partners in improving our organizations.
The panelists also encouraged trainers to talk with the business functions, find out what's important to them, and collaborate on ways to help them solve the issues that keep them up at night.
Marketing our impact on our organizations
How many of us have gotten written feedback on workshop evaluations to the tune of "thank you for this incredible workshop that's going to help me do my job better"? Yet, how many of us have forwarded that feedback to our supervisors or to senior management? How many of us include management when our training teams meet to review our results and discuss successes, challenges, and lessons learned?
The panelists urged trainers not to keep training evaluation information to ourselves. If we're too humble, we're actually doing a disservice to our organization's decision-makers, because we're withholding information that would help them understand the value of training. We need to share information about money saved, value added, performance improved, etc.
We trainers know that we provide a valuable service. We prevent problems, improve service to our clients, increase our organizations' impact on our missions, and enhance efficiency, which saves our organizations time, money, and resources. We need to make sure we're not the only ones who know how valuable we are and how much we contribute.
The panel
The panel was organized by Lance Tukell, ASTDNY's President-Elect and Chair of the Training Directors Special Interest Group (who was also a panelist), and moderated by Diane McCulloch, ASTDNY's Vice President of Programs.
Panelists included:
- Aleksander Scekic, VP of Talent Management & Organization Development, AIG
- Lance Tukell, Director of Global Training and Development, AIG
- Don Decker, Director of Learning and Development, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
- Mark Bottini, VP, Director of Stores, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
- John M. Attinger, Technology Training Manager, Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
- Gina Elliott - Director of Technology Support, Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
- James O'Hern, Corporate Director of Learning, HESS Corporation
- Paul Maccaro, Corporate Director of Talent Management, HESS Corporation.
(See my prior blog post "The Value of Joining a Professional Training Association" for more information about ASTDNY.)
Good training design = when there's nothing left to take out.
Today I attended an excellent, free lunchtime webinar hosted by InSync Training (see my prior blog post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online" for info about these webinars). The facilitator was Jane Bozarth of www.bozarthzone.com, the co-facilitator was Kassy LaBorie of www.insynctraining.com, and the webinar shared the title of one of Bozarth's books, Better than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging E-Learning with PowerPoint.
Ms. Bozarth shared the rule of thumb above for good training design. What did she mean?
When a trainer or instructional designer (I'll just say "trainer" for simplicity) approaches material that needs to go into a training - whether e-learning, webinar, or classroom-based training - the trainer needs to start by thinking: What are the key objectives for the training? And what is extraneous information that confuses the point?
In order to keep participants focused on the learning objectives, the trainer needs to cut away all of the extraneous information, so that what's left is clearly related to the objectives. Once the material has been cut down to the essential information, the trainer needs to consider how to present the information in a way that's tied to real world behavior change on the job. Then, just as the raw material needs to be cut down to the essential, the activities and training materials must also be cut down. Irrelevant PowerPoint slides, handouts, graphics, text, colors, animations, activities, etc. must be cut away, so that the training content that's left is clearly related to the objectives.
This process can be deceptively time-consuming. For nonprofit trainers doing a lot more with a lot less right now, it can be easier to just dump everything we can think of into training, rather than taking the time to sort through the content and focus it. However, if we don't create clear and effective training the first time, we may end up having to redo it, so in the end it can save time to do this right. And, if we implement good training design that leads to quality service and performance towards our organizations' missions, our clients will be the ultimate beneficiaries.
As nonprofit trainers in these tumultuous times, we have the opportunity to help our organizations both manage and lead our staff. Both functions are essential.
Yesterday, I was at the March session of Community Resource Exchange's 2009 Leadership Caucus (http://www.crenyc.org/consult/consult_leadershipcaucu s.php), where we spent the morning discussing the differences between leadership and management. The jumping off point for the discussion was John P. Kotter's 1990 Harvard Business Review article "What Leaders Really Do," in which he argues that management and leadership are complementary but distinct.
To sum up the article, Kotter describes managers as promoting stability, which includes putting hierarchies, processes, and policies in place. These systems organize and monitor people's efficiency and accuracy as they work on their organization's plans. Kotter describes leaders, on the other hand, as pushing for and supporting change. This includes aligning people so that everyone moves towards the same target, which is done by communicating a motivating vision of the future, and then convincing and empowering people to make that vision happen.
Applying these ideas specifically to trainers, when trainers work in service of management, we make sure that staff know how to do things like fill out paperwork correctly, follow procedures properly, and comply with regulations. When we work in service of leadership, we make sure that staff understand our organizations' missions, visions, and values, and we inspire staff to bring these to life. For training to have an impact on participants' behavior on the job, we as trainers need to do both.
This is especially true in the nonprofit world, where organizations strive for success on a double bottom line -- we measure success in both revenue and in progress toward our missions. In other words, we need to succeed with our heads as well as our hearts. A nonprofit organization could make huge amounts of money, but if that happened while making no progress toward its mission, the nonprofit's work would be deemed a failure. Conversely, a nonprofit could make wonderful progress toward its mission, but if that happened while losing huge amounts money, the nonprofit would cease to exist.
These issues of management vs. leadership and revenue vs. mission come to life for nonprofit trainers in that we need to address both our participants' skills and their motivation. We must provide staff with the tools they need to implement our organizations' program models, and we must also provide staff with the inspiration they will need to overcome challenges and strive towards the mission and vision.
Right now, with staff roles changing as nonprofits' budgets decrease and tough decisions being made that impact organizations' visions of the future, nonprofit trainers can be an overlooked resource. Many nonprofit trainers are adept at integrating the issues I described, as many of us have balanced the needs of management and leadership, skills and motivation in our workshops for years. This means that right now, we can be of great service to our organizations.
So the question for us becomes: how can each of us, in our own situations in our own nonprofits, step up to help with managing and leading our organizations through the crisis we face today?
Nonprofits can save classroom training costs by learning to train with technology
In these economic times, resourceful nonprofit staff are looking for ways to do more with less by cutting costs, including costs associated with classroom training, such as travel, space, and supplies.
One way to cut these classroom training costs but still provide high quality training on needed topics is to replace some classroom workshops with webinars, which are essentially workshops conducted using an online conferencing service such as MegaMeeting, WebEx, GoToMeeting, iLinc, Adobe ConnectPro, or other.
To clarify: because webinars are still relatively new, people sometimes confuse them with webcasts. Webcasts are one-way streams of information, in which the viewer cannot communicate with the facilitator or can only communicate by sending typed questions. These are basically online presentations with one or more speakers and potentially hundreds or thousands of viewers, and they are not particularly effective vehicles for training because they are focused on providing information rather than changing behavior.
Webinars, on the other hand, are much more interactive and are therefore also called online workshops/training or live virtual workshops/training. They include two-way communication between the facilitator and the participants, and they can include many types of interaction, including taking polls with results immediately visible in charts or graphs, having participants type or draw on the screen for everyone to see, having participants instant message specific people or everyone, asking participants to break into smaller groups for activities or discussions in breakout rooms, asking participants to react to information by selecting emoticons, showing video, or just plain asking questions that participants answer by talking out loud.
These interactions are key to effective webinars, and a good rule of thumb is to include some kind of interaction with participants every few minutes at minimum. With participants logging in remotely and with competition from email, the Internet, and their surrounding environments, participants won't put up with boredom for long before tuning out.
This makes excellent webinar design critical, and fortunately there is a great free resource for learning how to do this. Twice a month, InSync Training offers a free webinar for beginners called Learn How to Learn Online, as well as additional free webinars to sharpen skills. I've attended both the beginner webinar and several additional ones and can recommend them as helpful, fun, and filled with practical techniques you can use right away.
The details on how to sign up for these webinars are available on the InSync Training website at http://www.insynctraining.com/calendar.htm
http://www.dimdim.com/products/dimdim_editions_free.html
Nonprofit trainers can benefit from joining ASTD or other organizations
In the nonprofit world, most of our organizations are small. Thus, training can frequently be handled by one person as just one part of their job responsibilitie s, or perhaps by a handful of people in a small department. This means that those of us who are professional nonprofit trainers don't have many colleagues within our organizations.
In order to exchange ideas about training, find out about resources, and learn how others handle similar challenges, it's valuable for nonprofit trainers to join a professional association such as the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).
I am a member of both national ASTD and the local NY Metro ASTD chapter and find value in both, but there are plenty of other professional associations available to trainers in New York City. Since I'm most familiar with ASTD and ASTDNY, I'll share what I find valuable about membership in these.
National ASTD (www.astd.org) is a great source of information and resources, as it hosts conferences, offers professional development, offers a professional certification as a trainer, offers an online community for networking, provides a job bank, and publishes research on training topics, as well as many print & online periodicals. I've used my ASTD membership to attend an excellent workshop on developing quality e-learning, and I read the helpful periodicals that come with membership. I've also published articles in one of their periodicals, T+D Magazine.
The local NY Metro ASTD chapter (www.astdny.org) is a great source of in-person networking and events to help you stay current on developments in the training field. As an ASTDNY member, I've attended monthly Gather-and-Shar e networking events, participated in the e-learning special interest group and the training directors special interest group, and attended monthly chapter events on topics such as interactive training design, training multicultural groups, evaluating training, executive on-boarding, and more.
The February 2009 ASTDNY chapter event featured amazing demos of computer simulations for developing managers' soft skills. The sample simulations were demo-ed by Dr. Glenn Albright, Director of Applied Research, and Ralph Vacca, Chief Learning Architect, of Kognito Interactive. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn about the cutting-edge work being done by a local organization that creates learning simulations and games, and every chapter event begins with time for networking - so if you feel moved to come to an event, I hope you'll say hi.
Upcoming ASTDNY events will cover a variety of topics, including how training professionals are working on challenges due to the economic crisis, what senior managers really think of training departments, and case studies of e-learning that develops soft skills.
For me, membership in a professional organization helps stimulate my thinking about how my team and I can continually improve our service to our organization's clients by taking advantage of the latest knowledge and technology in the training field. It also provides me with context and a bigger picture view of my work.
Are you a member of a professional training organization? If so, which one, and what do you find valuable about it? I hope you'll share.
Do more with less by taking advantage of existing resources
In the nonprofit sector, we often end up working so hard and on such tight deadlines that we don't pause to look around and discover the existing resources that could help us. We end up reinventing the wheel, when we could better serve our clients by spending our resources and energy on more needed work.
As an example, if a nonprofit trainer is asked to create new training on computer skills, it can be a better use of resources to do some research and then refer staff to existing free or low-cost tutorials. Then, the trainer can focus on developing more mission-critica l workshops.
Free computer tutorials
Since the example above is a common one, you might find the following free online computer tutorials useful. I have included these because I have heard that they are good, but there are many other free and low-cost options online.
Free computer classes
Also, why develop computer classes from scratch for just a few people in your organization, in this economic climate, when the NY public library offers them for free? You can register on their website www.nypl.org by clicking on "Classes."
In an age when the nature of most nonprofit's challenges center around financial management and leadership, we believe it's important to quickly and effectively impart the skills today's leaders need as they face the economic climate.
Your readers maybe interested in a free webinar and series of tools to help them weather today's storms. Initially funded by the Robin Hood, Tiger and Clark Foundations, these free resources are helping many. They're located at www.fmainstitute.net.
www.fmainstitute.net
Thank you very much for sharing this resource with us!
The Mulvaney Group's 30-minute Courageous Coffee Conversations
How many of us could use help with interpersonal skills at work, especially around difficult conversations?
In the nonprofit field, many of us have strong personalities and care deeply about our work. We work hard, we sacrifice our personal time to work more hours or think about our work, and we believe that our work matters. We try to do the right thing, based on both our professional and personal opinions.
We're also stressed about the economic climate right now and what it will mean for our clients, our organizations, and ourselves.
This means that conflicts at work have the potential to be intense. After all, if we believe that we are good people who have our clients' best interests at heart, what does that make the person who disagrees with us?
So, I'm happy to let you know about a wonderful free resource offered by The Mulvaney Group, whose tag line is "To fix the unfixable."
Approximately every three weeks, their founder and president Tim Mulvaney leads free 30-minute trainings based on role plays of real-life difficult workplace scenarios drawn from The Mulvaney Group's 15 years of experience. (Full disclosure: I learned about these because Tim and I are both members of the American Society for Training and Development; he is a past president of the NY Metro chapter.)
These "Coffee Conversations" are done by phone, which makes them easy to attend, and the times alternate between morning, lunchtime, and evening, which makes them fit anyone's schedule.
They are also recorded, edited, and posted as podcasts along with a downloadable pdf of the lessons learned, which makes them useful tools anytime.
I have attended several of these mini-trainings, including one today, so I can vouch for their great quality. Tim makes good use of everyone's time by keeping the 30 minutes brisk and by staying focused on learning. He keeps the role play on track, and he conducts an excellent debrief to extract lessons that we can use.
He also chooses topics that are interesting, relevant, and useful. Examples of recent topics include asking a supervisor about the possibility of layoffs, expressing discomfort with how close a supervisor habitually stands, talking with a coworker about the appropriateness of religious messages at work, and asking a colleague not to talk so much about personal issues at work.
For all the details, for downloads, and to sign up for the email list, you can go to http://www.themulvaneygrou p.com/coffee_conversations/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.themulvaneygrou p.com/coffee_conversations/
http://www.themulvaneygrou p.com/coffee_conversations/
and here is another attempt at providing a link:
http://www.themulvaneygrou p.com/coffee_conversations/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.themulvaneygrou p.com/coffee_conversations/
Thanks!
Thank you for your post and your question!
I have not tried this out myself, but the American Society for Training and Development has a great reputation and offers an off-the-shelf Facilitation Skills Training workshop for about . It's available on their website at www.astd.org, and here is a direct link to the curriculum: http://tinyurl.com/bzlr25" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/bzlr25. It comes with pre-developed workshops and workshop materials on CD.
Since budgets are tight these days, I'm also including free links below to some articles I've written that might be useful:
Put Down the Script: Trainers can avoid reading leader guides during presentations with the help of a a few practical tips. Written with Alexa Sorden. This article provides ways to prevent one of the top complaints about trainers -- that they read directly from the leader guide. It is available here: http://tinyurl.com/9b3ujo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/9b3ujo
Get a Move On: Put some life into classroom training with engaging activities that force participants to leave their seats. Written with Trinee Adams and Alejandra Kennedy. This article gives ideas of ways to make training more effective and memorable by making it more interactive, and can help trainers remember to meet a basic need of workshop participants -- for their trainer to keep them awake. It is available here: http://tinyurl.com/7gfrbk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/7gfrbk
Spicing Up Classroom Training: Trainers can add zing to a leader guide with a few simple tips. This article provides ideas of ways to improve leader guides that lack interactivity, to increase the impact of a workshop -- this can help open trainers' eyes to the importance of engaging learners. A summary is available here, but you have to create a free log-in to read the whole article: http://tinyurl.com/d6f495" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/d6f495
For a little more information on this last topic, I was interviewed as a guest expert about this on The Accidental Trainer website, and the interview is available here: http://tinyurl.com/bb9cy8" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/bb9cy8
Good luck with your workshop, and if you try out the ASTD curriculum, please let us know what you think!
New study reinforces this concept
Helpful training tip:
When training staff or otherwise giving them information that we expect them to remember, it's useful to keep in mind that the human brain remembers information best when it's chunked into smaller, related units of information. Long, continuous presentations of information confuse us, but we can understand when the information is broken up and organized.
This is true for phone numbers (xxx) yyy-zzzz, social security numbers xxx-yy-zzzz, top ten lists, text broken into paragraphs by topic, books broken into chapters by subject, songs structured into choruses & verses, etc. There are countless examples in everyday life.
A recent study looked into whether remembering chunked information is due to nature or nurture -- do we remember information that's chunked because we've been taught to do so, or because of our brain's biology? The researchers found that babies remember information better when it's chunked by concept, suggesting that this is a fundamental way the brain works.
So, when you're creating a training, writing a memo, or otherwise presenting information, remembering to chunk the information will help your target audience remember your message.
If you'd like to read the details of the study, it was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and can be accessed on their website here: http://tinyurl.com/ctccj4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/ctccj4
Happy New Year! And welcome to the inaugural post of the new NY Nonprofit Press blog on training, learning, and professional development. In this blog, we’ll be exploring ideas about enhancing staff skills in order to best serve our clients. Because conversation is one of the best ways to explore ideas, I hope you’ll post your ideas, feedback, and questions, so that we can help each other develop our thinking about the issues we discuss.
To kick off this blog, since change begins at home, I’m going to focus on enhancing our own skills. It’s New Year’s resolution season, and you may be one of the folks who resolved to secure a new job or recession-proof your career by updating your job abilities and expertise.
To help target your resolution, it may be helpful to know about the specific skills NYC nonprofits wish their staff would develop.
Last year, Leta Malloy, Shannon Smith, Sherri-Ann Simmons Terry, and I conducted a survey to determine which skills nonprofit staff are lacking. (You can read the details about this survey in the October 2008 edition of NYNP, page 21.) We found that nonprofits wish their staff had better written and oral communication skills, interpersonal and teamwork skills, self-awareness, professionalism, and leadership skills. Updating your resume with training attended on these topics may give you an advantage.
If you are looking for places to get trained on these topics, survey respondents recommended the following organizations:
• American Management Association (several topics)
• Big Brothers Big Sisters (several topics)
• Community Resource Exchange (leadership)
• MediaBistro (writing)
• Gotham Writers Workshop (writing)
• The Leading Institute (leadership)
• Support Center for Nonprofit Management (several topics)
• United Way of NYC’s Nonprofit Leadership Development Institute (leadership)
Finally, since we’re a nonprofit community, let’s bring it back to our clients. The folks we surveyed let us know that a lack of staff skills can hamper their organizations’ ability to serve their clients well – which means that when you update your professional skills, you are not just helping recession-proof your resume, you’re ultimately improving your positive impact on your organization’s clients.
Good luck with your New Year’s resolutions, and if you’ve attended training that you can recommend, please share it with us.
1) Potential future topic: I volunteer at a non-profit, and they are lovely folks but truly awful at organizing their volunteers. Not taking advantage of free labor because you're too disorganized seems like a missed opportunity, especially in this economy. Not sure how that dovetails with training, but anyway.
2) This may be out of your control, but there does not appear to be a way to subscribe to this blog using a feed reader (RSS). Putting the web address directly into Google Reader was also fruitless. For now, into the dusty bookmarks folder (but because you are awesome I will remember to check it occasionally).
Best of luck!
P.S. - In the meantime, readers should use the "Post Reply" buttons to respond to blog comments. Otherwise, the dialogue gets out of synch. That's another technical issue we will be fixing soon. Thanks again.
Thank you again for your post!
I am still thinking about your question about volunteering & will get back with a training viewpoint soon. In the meantime, you might want to suggest that the agency that you volunteer with check out one of the NYNP blogs that deals specifically with this topic -- Alexandra Collier's blog has been packed with great information about volunteer management and administration.
She is the Director of Volunteer Services and Special Projects at the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (JASA), and her blog explores the myriad challenges that nonprofit volunteer administrators face and provides insight and ideas for creating an excellent volunteer program within any organization. http://www.nynp.biz/index.php/community-forum s/234-alexandra-coll ier
All the best,
Matthea
Thank you for your post and your questions!
A great way to develop your training skills is to join the American Society for Training and Development, which has a NY Metro chapter that offers events that let you network with other training professionals while learning about some of the latest topics in our industry. The chapter membership is separate from the national organization membership, and to get the member discount for chapter events you need the chapter membership rather than the national one.
To market yourself, I suggest networking, which you can do online and in person.
Organizations for that have online networking communities for training professionals include Training Magazine, the American Society for Training and Development (the national organization, rather than the local chapter), and Chief Learning Officer magazine. If you are interested in e-learning, the Elearning Guild has an online community as well. For general career networking online, LinkedIn.com is a good resource.
To network in person in NYC, good organizations include Gotham City Networking, Inc., MeetUp.com (which currently has 677 networking groups on business & career topics), and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network.
I've been having some technical trouble posting web addresses, but I'll give it a try:
http://astdny.org
http://www.astd.org/
http://www.trainingmagnetw ork.com/main/home
http://network.clomedia.com/
http://www.elearningguild.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/
http://www.gothamnetworkin g.com/
http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ny/new_york/groups/
http://www.ynpnnyc.org
Good luck Christian, and please let us know how it goes.
All the best,
Matthea