Finding ways to change-up your training can be difficult, especially if some of the ways you’ve used before don’t seem to adapt well to the material you’re using now. And who really has time to re-create the wheel? So don’t. Borrow some of our tips here. These are less common, but very engaging, ways to put some interaction into your education.
Buzz Groups: Have your participants get into small groups of about 4-7 people and let them know these are their buzz groups, especially if you have other small groups throughout the training. These groups are specifically used for regular discussion on assigned topics.
Field Trips: Weren’t these your favorite days in elementary school, even if you didn’t like where you were going? Field trips let learners explore concepts and learning outside of the same old classroom walls. This can be as simple as walking outside or doing an activity in a hallway.
News Articles: Again, another tip borrowed from childhood—using the newspaper and current events. Use recent news articles to help support learning and learning content. If your training is more than a day, you can use this as an assignment for your learners to find current events relating to your topic. Homework is not a four-letter word.
Testimonies: Don’t be afraid to ask those who have been through training on your topic to come in and give a testimony regarding the value of the information. Using personal experiences to validate learning and hearing success stories about something learned is extremely valuable to you as the trainer in motivating your learners by showing the material’s necessity and applicability to their jobs.
Picture Studies: Use images to teach a series of steps. You can either use this before you teach the information to gauge their knowledge of the topic or after as a post-test to gauge what they learned. You can set it up so learners identify the order of steps or several things missing in each picture.
Picture Crosswords: Instead of tricky word clues, use images as the clues for a crossword.
Find & Fix: Another useful tool being utilized by elementary teachers. Instead of taking a student’s document and correcting the errors made by, note the errors and have them fix it. Or create your own flawed document and ask learners to “fix” it by correcting the errors.
If you’ve created any of these tools, send them to us at EzineEditor@BobPikeGroup.com so we can make them available to other trainers! They may appear here in our ezine or in other sister publications.
