AI - no, not artificial intelligence

As we're getting towards the end of the course we've pretty much covered all the content we need to. To keep the learners engaged over the next couple of weeks, I'm running some workshops on subjects which are additional to what's required but still relevant to the subject area.

So, this week I ran a workshop on appreciative enquiry. This is quite a difficult concept to explain so I ran it with them as I would in a real situation. Appreciative enquiry is a way of using delegates' existing experience as a firm base for future learning, action and improvements in performance and is typically a 4 stage process:

1. World cafe - group based sharing of experiences

2. Positive core - distilling those experiences down to a handful of behaviours

3. Image of the future - building a clear picture of what the future should look like

4. Making it happen - putting in place actions which use existing behaviours to make the image of the future a reality.

The content of the session seemed to go down very well as it is something that the learners hadn't experienced before and which they could apply to their own training practice.

It's the final countdown

This evening's class was the forth and final one which was observed and for this session I tried something out which I'd seen someone else running as part of their teaching. The other week I carried out an observation on one of the other lecturers at the College and they used some case studies as a learning method. This seemed to be particularly effective so I thought I'd have a go at writing some to run with my group.

The week before we'd covered the levels of Kirkpatrick's evaluation model so I wrote four case studies which required the learners to create evaluation strategies which could be used in the different situations. The learners were then required to present these back to the larger group.

I think this went really well and it enabled me to engage the learners in some of Blooms higher learning objectives as they were required to analyse and evaluate.

Snowball anyone?

My class is coming towards the end of the course now so I'm trying to keep the momentum going by including lots of activities.

This week we started to look at the subject of evaluating training and I applied a snowballing technique to the first activity. I started by asking the learners to work independently to think of and write down what they felt was the purpose and benefits of evaluating training. When they had done this, I asked them to discuss their thoughts in pairs, then in fours. The aim of the task was for each group to come up with a definitive list.

This technique seemed to work well as it allowed all learners to form their own opinions before discussing them with others (in either pairs or fours). This is particularly beneficial for the quieter learners who may struggle to make the opinions heard in a large group. It also led to well formed responses rather than random ones, which are quite often the result of brainstorming.