I was talking to a colleague about a seminar we both attended recently. We each enjoyed the seminar and took away a few key pieces of information, but it had been so jam packed with info that we both felt that we hadn’t been able to take advantage of everything that was covered.
This led to a long discussion on how I would re-design the seminar into a blended learning process to help improve the knowledge retention of all of the participants. As I started to write it up, I realized it was too long for one post, so I’ve broken it down into a couple of steps.
Step 1: Assign Pre-work
I’ve gotten push back on this before because not all participants will do the pre-work, but I paid for the seminar and if I want to get the most out of it, I will do the pre-work. If I am being forced to go to the seminar by my boss, and I am not motivated enough to do the pre-work, the odds are that I won’t be motivated enough to pay attention anyways. The non-motivated learner is behind the eight-ball from the beginning. There are ways to get them back, but that is another topic.
Okay, but let’s get back to why we assign pre-work. Assigning pre-work does two things.
First, it moves some of the simple content out of the live event and makes that time more efficient. There were some core concepts that the instructor needed to go over in the seminar, those could easily have been moved to some simple pre-reading. There were also a few exercises where the instructor had us brain-storm for 5 minutes about an issue we were having with our companies, this could easily have been moved to pre-work. I would have shown up with the work done and we could have spent more time on what to do with the issues, not dreaming them up.
Second, pre-work provides what my ID friends call a “cognitive organizer”. Basically when we hear information for the first time, our brain is trying to sort it out and organize it. Think of your brain as a big filing system. If the information is coming in too fast, you tend to just lump everything into one big folder. Or, if you brain is busy trying to label and sort stuff as it comes in, you might lose some of the new information. The pre-work, if designed properly, helps your brain start building that file system. If the pre-work introduces the high-level topics, but doesn’t deluge you with information, your brain has time to do the “labeling” and get things organized. Then, during the live seminar, your brain already has the organization system set up, and is much more capable of filing the information away properly. This improves long-term knowledge retention. Basically, your brain now has a nice organized system to help retain and retrieve the information that it needs.
Great stuff - keep it coming please. I’ve been doing pre- and post- workshop learning for the last couple of years, and it helps a lot, but the “cognitive organizer” concept is new to me and super helpful. Thanks!
Comment by Cleve — July 31, 2006 @ 11:08 am
Cleve,
The “cognitive organizer” has been a very useful concept to me as well. Here is another example that I’ve used in the past.
In the pre-work (or even very beginning of the class) ask the learners a question that they don’t have the knowledge to answer yet. Don’t provide them feedback on the answer.
Then, as you go through the training, they will naturally start applying their learning to that question. As you teach, you will see “the lights come on.” At the end of the class (or e-Learning lesson), ask them the same question.
We’ve used this in e-Learning and gave the learner the opportunity to see their original answer and then modify it based on their learning. It is always interesting to see the change in the answer.
Comment by Doug Foster — August 1, 2006 @ 10:23 am