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Learners Pull The Content They Need

Do you ever wonder why your learners are never as excited to learn as you are to teach.  Well maybe, it’s because we often try to push content into our learners rather than encouraging them to pull the content they need from us.  If we think about it, they are more likely to learn and retain what they want and get than what we think is best for them.

But how to do that?

Here are a few ideas to get you started.

I’m sure you have:

• Induction/orientation workshops where experts from say HR or Legal come in for an hour or so and _push_ their content towards your learners.
• Sales training where a product expert tries to _push_ product specifications into salespeople (and we all know how well that’s received).
• Changes made to legislation that people need to know and apply so you have the expert again _pushing_ the updates towards the practitioners.

Let’s reverse this expert push to a learner pull

Ask the Expert (assume it’s some new legislation)

• Ask learner to form teams of 5 or 6.
• Give them a challenge that is directly related to their job eg in this example I might challenge them to create a ‘To Do’ list for people in their department to ensure they comply with all the new legislation.  If it was sales I might challenge them to identify 3 clients they could visit to propose the new product and develop the script for their meetings.
• Let them know that there will be a ‘guest’ expert who will answer questions they generate, allowing them to complete their challenge.
• Suggest that teams work together for about 7-10 minutes and compile a list of questions they would like answered about eg the new legislation and how it might relate to their everyday work.  Suggest each person in the team should create 3-5 questions they will ask.
• Allow time for teams to generate their questions.

Notice – At this point notice what’s happening in the workshop.  My guess would be that learners are starting to think about what they need regarding the content, chatting that through with other learners in their team and creating a set of questions they would like to have answered ie they are preparing to pull the content they need.

• Setup an area of seats and a table in front of the seats ie like a press conference.
• Bring in the Subject Matter Expert and seat them on the table in front of the chairs – that might be you.
• Bring in the learners  ‘journalists’.
• Allow around 7 minutes for the questioning to take happen.
• Thank your Subject Matter Expert.
• Ask learners to return to their teams and prepare their xx (whatever you challenged them to produce).
• Ask teams to present what they have created.

What happened

Learners pulled the content they needed to go back and apply to their own work role rather than someone pushing what they wanted to tell them.

Other techniques

• Rather than explain a process or procedure before letting learners try to do it, reverse this.  Ask them to try the process and if they get stuck, ask (pull) for help to continue.
• If content is knowledge based, set a challenge, something that has already happened in their workplace.  Point learners to resources they might find useful to be able to accomplish the challenge eg a complex accounting principle, give a challenge that has happened in the firm recently and ask them to apply the principle, give the technical content via paper, website, video, elearning and allow learners to work in 2’s, 3’s 4’s etc to use the resources and apply the principle.  Ask them to summaries at the end and then get them to action point how they will apply this in their everyday work.

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