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Review and Revisit: Improving the Outcome of Your Training
July 12, 2006 • By Bob Pike CSP, CPAE

Training, and reviewing, doesn’t have to be dull…but it’s so easy to make it that way. And yet, intersecting information with review creatively doesn’t have to be time consuming either in the preparation or the presentation.

                                                  

What’s the point of training? Training is never just for training’s sake—the whole point in training is the outcome.  One of the training keys to unlocking those results is Review and Revisit (which also happens to be the “R” in our CORE*).

 

There are dozens of ways to review content—some dry, dusty and dull—and then there are more thoughtful approaches that increase participation and therefore retention. And these can be used very handily in customizing new training or existing training programs—whether it was designed in-house or off-the-shelf.

 

To increase retention in your training:

 

First decide what level of mastery is needed for each “chunk” of content. Areas that only require awareness or familiarity don’t require as much revisiting. Content areas that need competence or mastery need to be revisited at least six times (according to Mehrabian) in order to move information from short-term into long-term memory.

 

Then choose creative ways of reviewing without calling it review—and make sure the participants and not the instructor are leading it. Techniques we use frequently at the Bob Pike Group are:

  • Mindmapping—where participants create their own or fill in a partially completed Mindmap
  • Top Ten List—where participants create a list of Top Ten best ideas so far, Top Ten questions to be asked, Top Ten most common problems faced, etc. Below is a Top Ten summary (and more!) that trainers at Disney Institute created as a close to one of the programs I did with them. 
  • Action Idea List—where participants periodically go to an Action Idea page in the workbook and add to the list of the most important things they’ve learned that will be used on the job.

 

Our Creative Training Techniques Handbook and Mel Silberman’s 101 Ways to Make Training Active have more ways of increasing retention during training.

 

  • CORE: Closers, Openers, Review and Revisit, and Energizers, discussed on page 223 of CTT Handbook.

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