Learners Learn By Teaching Others

As training facilitators, we may be the subject matter expert, but that doesn’t mean we have to stand at the front and deliver. In fact, if we really want our learners to learn, we should be adding learner challenge, learner involvement then stepping back to watch the learning take place.

How do we do that? Well, here’s a technique that does exactly that plus it works equally well when learners need to learn a skill or knowledge.

Preparation

Divide your content into 3 logical pieces. Maybe it’s:

3 steps of a process
3 different products eg financial products
3 different departments eg for an induction workshop
3 different features or screens of an IT system or software

The four step process is:

Step 1

Ask learners to form 3 teams. The number of learners per team doesn’t matter – although the 3 teams should have roughly the same number of learners.
Offer an overview of the content eg the process, system, products etc

Step 2

Hand out the 3 pieces of content giving each team a different piece.
Ask learners to work together to pick out key pieces of information and to help each other either perform the skill or apply the knowledge.
Allow 10-15 minutes.
Ask learners to work in their teams to devise how to teach this skill or knowledge to other learners in the group. Tell them that each team member will be teaching this content to another learner in the room.
Allow 10 minutes.

Step 3

Give each team a number eg team 1, 2 and 3
Ask learners to form new teams. Each team must consist of at least one team 1 member, one team 2 member and one team 3 member. If there are more than one member from each team that’s fine. (If you have 2 or more 1’s, 2’s and 3’s per new team, you might want to consider breaking this into 2 teams).
Ask the team 1 members to teach the other people in their new team the skill or knowledge they have just learned.
This is then repeated for team members 2 and 3.

Each person has now taught what they learned and learned what other team members had uncovered.

Step 4

Bring the group back together and summarise the new content or create a task where learners need to demonstrate their new skill or knowledge.

Here you really have facilitated the learning rather than taught the content. Because your learners did all the work, you can be sure that it’s more memorable and that the learning has more chance to stick.

Call to action
Rather than offer ‘Death by PowerPoint’ or standing and delivering content, get your learners involved. That way your learners take the lead and you take a back seat. All you have to do is check that learning is taking place. So, it’s easier for you and certainly more memorable and enjoyable for your learners.