‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught’– Oscar Wilde
Managers can often feel frustrated that they are investing time and energy into training their teams, only to wonder if they are bashing their head against a brick wall, wondering why the team simply aren’t always ‘getting it’. It can be helpful to ask if we’re so busy thinking about what we are teaching that we have forgotten to think about whether the trainees are learning, what they are learning, and what their experience of that learning is.
Educational theorist Edgar Dale tells us that people generally remember 10 per cent of what they read, 20 per cent of what they are told, 30 per cent of what they see, but 90 per cent of what they experience. Dale notes that when learners are active, they are able to work in a way that involves being creative and evaluative, as opposed to being limited to recall through reading information.
In one training session based around British Values, small groups were given a topic to discuss. Each member was given three buttons, and they had to ‘spend’ a button each time they spoke. This made them think carefully before speaking, stopped one person dominating, and encouraged everyone to listen to others. The participants would be able to use the same game with young children to teach them British Values, and experiencing it was so much more powerful than just telling them about it.
Another American educational thinker, Malcolm Knowles, developed a theory of andragogy (relating to adult learning, as opposed to ‘pedagogy’, relating to children). In addition to believing that learning should be experiential, Knowles believed that adults:
• learn best when the topic has personal or professional relevance
• should have a say in learning experiences – through planning and evaluation
• enjoy solving problems, rather than just taking in information.
Here are some top tips for planning an effective interactive learning session:
WRITE A BRIEF LESSON PLAN
The plan doesn’t need to be long or time-consuming, but making a note of timings helps keep the session on track. Making a plan also means you can see ‘at a glance’ how much of the session participants are going to be active for.
BRAINSTORM THE SESSION AIMS
Ask staff at the very beginning of the session what they are hoping to gain from it. This enables you to make sure your aims for training match up with what they feel they need to learn. Use this information to help you respond to their needs – be flexible and include their requests along with your original plans. Your learners will immediately feel involved in the session and will feel they have a reason for participating fully in it.
CONSIDER BARRIERS TO LEARNING
Learning yourself about the people attending a training session is important. It is all too easy to assume we know about our teams, but do we know who is dyslexic, or who gets anxious about speaking in a group? Asking someone with dyslexia to be the scribe for the group, or someone who is anxious about speaking to do a presentation, could result in embarrassment, lack of engagement and a severe knock to their confidence. It’s a good idea to ask the learners individually if there is anything in terms of their learning needs or styles that they would like to share with you.
USE ACTIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCES
‘Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience,’ said David Kolb, whose theory of experiential learning suggested starting with a concrete experience and then reflecting on this. The psychologist suggested this process leads to a new level of understanding, which can be taken forward into new situations and tried out. For example, the team try out an experience within a training session, have time to reflect upon it, and then take it into their day-to-day practice. Avoid talking too much – the trainees should be more active than the trainer. Examples of activities for participants include:
• Role play.
• Planning and delivering a short presentation to the team.
• Researching a topic online and in books and feeding back to the group.
• Reading a short article and then discussing it in the group.
• Presenting the team with a problem and asking them to brainstorm it together.
• Individual and group reflection.
PROVIDE NOTES
There is a temptation in training to write everything down, or film it. Sometimes, however, we absorb the most when we put our pens down and just get truly ‘stuck in’ to the experience. It can be helpful for participants to have something to revisit, so printing off some brief notes for staff is a good idea and means they can relax and get really involved in the learning experience.
LINK TO PRACTICE
Linking between sessions and everyday practice is essential to enable learning to truly embed. Teams can be supported effectively through the use of a fully joined up learning programme that links appraisals, supervision, mentoring, coaching, training sessions, with a thread of reflective practice running through each of these, supported by the nursery manager. Each member of the team can have their own professional development record, which is reviewed at appraisals and supervisions and details shared learning goals discussed with the manager.
CASE STUDY: LYMINGTON MONTESSORI SCHOOL
Training goal: making more effective use of a set of Montessori resources for developing children’s mathematical skills.
The manager knew the team well, their experience and personal strengths and areas for development. Her awareness of their training needs arose from observation of practitioners and children as well as individual supervision, appraisals and personal development plans. Some were Montessori-trained, others were not; some were confident in developing children’s maths skills, others were not. As the team gathered for training at the end of the working day, the manager shared her objectives for the session so she met their ‘need to know’. In explaining that she would help them develop the children’s maths skills more effectively, she met Knowles’ conditions of ‘readiness to learn’ and ‘orientation to learning’.
In order to teach the staff how to use these resources effectively, the manager paired Montessori-trained staff with those who weren’t trained in using the equipment. Those with Montessori experience would be the ‘adult’ and take their colleague through an activity using the specialist resources, as they would do with a child. The novice in the role of child experienced the educational technique, and took on a child’s perspective in developing new mathematical concepts. It is worth noting that to make this work, it is important to have developed secure, trusting relationships with and between individual staff members so that they feel safe to take on these roles (remembering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – see previous instalment of this series). There is something quite special about getting in touch with the child within, to come to new learning with fresh curiosity and real enjoyment.
At the end of the session, individuals reflected on learnings and identified a personal target for development, based on something they had learned in the session, and focusing on the needs of one or more key children. These targets were recorded and staff knew they would be discussed in their next supervision, so as to try to link the training with future practice.
Anne Oldfield is a qualified social worker and head of professional studies at Brockenhurst College. Sarah Emerson is an independent early years and parenting consultant, and a consultant for Indigo Wellbeing, and works at a children’s centre-based nursery.
