Learning is More Than Listening: How to Get Participants Applying Learning.

Learning in itself is a wonderful thing, but it’s even better when it leads to us actually being able to do something. Especially in a workplace setting where being able to ‘do’ things better is likely the reason for the learning in the first place.

However, I have so often been in training where no actual doing happens. Where participants are sat listening and asking questions and there is a lovely slide pack with some well designed slides for the facilitator to talk through. Maybe participants get to have a group discussion about the topics or there is a quiz to see how many facts they can remember. It all seems fine but it’s not necessarily preparing those participants to apply the learning once they leave the classroom.

In the best training, participants are able to practice applying the learning to real (or real-ish) life scenarios. This helps them to see how the knowledge works in practice and work through some of the possible problems they may have in a safe an supporting environment.

This isn’t always easy to do, especially if you are delivering a one-off session or aren’t very familiar with the work of your participants in advance.

Some of my favourite examples of practical learning application for within a single training session are:

Past examples of real work

This is one of the approaches that often won’t be applicable, but when it work is can be a really impactful training tool. I’ve been lucky enough recently to have been able to sit in on some legal training sessions where this has been used very effectively. Everyone in the training session was internal and so there were no security issues in these cases, but security is something to consider when using real life examples.

In the legal training sessions, previous cases, which had been anonymised, were used for participants to apply the content they had just learnt. They were given the cases along with the relevant law and asked to work in small groups to come up with what they would do had they been the solicitor working on this case.

The benefit of using real examples is that they could then compare their answers with the real legal outcomes, which led to some very interesting discussions around why decisions had been made.

Bring a problem

Another approach to applying learning in a training session can be to get participants to ‘bring a problem’ to the session (and hopefully leave with a solution). This can be a tricky one because it relies on participants doing work in advance and showing up prepared, which we know isn’t always going to happen. People are busy and training session pre-work is an easy thing to forget. For this reason, I always like to have a couple of fictional but relevant problems for participants to ‘borrow’ if needed.

Bringing a problem can work really well for sessions on personal development type topics, where participants could come prepared with something they would like to work on and can be supported to find a solution to their problem through the session. This would involve working with the facilitator, in pairs or small groups to talk through issues and identify where the learning can be applied to solve a problem.

Where this approach can be difficult is with topics like communication or management, where the problems faced by participants may be sensitive or confidential. In these scenarios it might not be appropriate to share with a group, especially if the participants all work in the same team or organisation.

Fictional people with fictional problems.

This works much like the approach above but with two main advantages:

-          You aren’t relying on participants to remember to do any pre-training work

-          There are no confidentiality issues

What you need to do is create a series of fictional characters who have a problem which can be solved by the proper application of the approaches you have just taught. These examples can then be assigned to groups with some attached questions, they can come up with the solutions together before sharing. The great thing about this type of activity is that you can purposefully create example which will steer participants towards your desired learning outcomes.

There are so many other ways of applying learning in a training session – role play being a classic (although sometimes unpopular) example. The important thing is that you are think about how your participants are going to actively practice the skills you are giving them, instead of just listening to you talk!

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