How To Conquer Yawns and Blank Stares by Engaging Your Audience

Engaging your audience during training is critical to the success of your training. When participants go back to their job, are they applying what you taught? If participants are passively listening while you’re reviewing power point slides, chances are they’re minds are drifting. The Bob Pike Group’s Creative Training Techniques® can be worked into your existing training to enhance what you’re currently doing. Experienced trainers are also available to help you completely overhaul your entire course.  

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Boring Training is Ineffective

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.” The impact on the number of students who would pass vs fail STEM classes using active learning goes a long way towards meeting the national goal of the President’s Council of Advisors (PCAST) to increase the number of STEM majors.

Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work said “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.” 

There are many different methods of active learning approaches, they include asking students to answer questions by using handheld clickers, calling on individuals or groups randomly, or having students clarify concepts to each other and discuss an issue among themselves.

Impact of the Bob Pike Training

Carrie Willink attended The Bob Pike annual conference and found the Creative Training Techniques® she learned at the conference to be refreshing and re-energizing not only for her audience, but also for her as a trainer. She has games and activities that she can apply in her training sessions right away. She learned them by the Instructor-Led, Participant-Centered (ILPC) method that The Bob Pike Group trainers use throughout all their workshops. Participants learn the techniques first hand by experiencing the activities and how best to use them.

Join Becky for Her New Session: Engineering Curiosity 

You'll find new sessions to refresh your training at the Annual Conference! Becky will share the latest techniques on Instructor-Led, Participant-Centered (ILPC) training at the NEW Engineering Curiosity session. Employee engagement remains the top concern for executive leadership. You'll learn proven training methods that drive training results through increased learner engagement!  

The Bob Pike Group Training Gets Results for Your Organization

The Bob Pike Group Workshops provide the techniques you need and opportunities to practice these techniques so you’re confident and ready to apply them when you’re back on the job.

Learn how to write effective training objectives with this Free Guide: 5 Tips for Writing Effective Objectives. 

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