Topic Category: Teaching

HLW-01-03 Guidelines for Effective Group Training

Principles of Learning – How Learning Works

Instructors and Trainers are facilitators of learning. Participants are responsible for learning and only learn based on their own actions and behaviour.

Maintaining Individual Engagement

To ensure individual participants remain engaged:

  • Keep Interactions short (20-25 mins, 5 min end of interaction) to keep participants on board.
  • Stand up breaks every 1.5 hours
  • Combine Presentation and Discussion – involve participants actively
  • Use activities to ensure participants commit to involvement
  • Observe all, bring back those being left behind or distracted
  • Use “Phones Down” to get participants to focus on presentation and discussion
  • Use “Phones Up” to focus participants on required exercises and activity

Managing Group activities

Some points to consider when creating groups for exercises:

  • Participants are at different levels of technology adoption and usage.
  • Ensure groups have mix of competencies. Ideally have one or more participants in each group that can be called on to assist others on more complex exercises. Leveraging peer based learning.
  • Ensure all participants are included during activities. Observe and intervene as needed. Step in and ask questions to bring “outsiders” back in.

TTT Student Knowledge

What a student brings with them as their foundation knowledge. Facilitators need to be aware of where students are at in terms of understanding and perceptions. Knowledge may be accurate or not. Knowledge may not always aligned to prerequisite expectations, or the context of the course being presented.

TTT Student Motivation

There are three key essential motivational drivers:

  • Value – Students have a sense of value that the course offers. If they see value they will be more motivated, if not then less so.
  • Self-Efficacy – Believing one can achieve something, even if it will take effort and be challenging, is key to remaining motivated.
  • Support – Taking on a challenge, if there is no support during times of difficulty then motivation will drop.