Help Learners Contextualise Their Action Plans
At the end of most workshops, I’m sure you say something like:
“What I’d like you to do now, is look back though your workshop notes and select 3 things that you will start doing as a result of this workshop and make these your action plan.”
And of course, your learners do this. You might even get them to share their action points with other team members.
But you know that the reality is most of their action points will never be revisited once they leave the training room.
Part of the reason for this might be that we’re not doing enough to help our learners _see_ where to actually apply their action points.
For example
Typical action points might be:
- To start to pay more attention to my learners states (following a train-the-trainer workshop)
- To start coaching my team (following a _coaching_ workshop)
- To organise my time better (following a time management workshop)
- To manage customer complaints better (following a customer service workshop)
Although these would be great actions for learners to start applying, learners don’t have a _trigger_ for applying them.
So why not ask them to write their action point, plus the trigger for using it. I find the If… Then … strategy works well (technically called the _implementation intention_ strategy).
Learners write their action point but include a trigger ie a real-life situation that will cause them to use the idea of their action point.
Help this by creating either a page in their workbook that has an
Action – If – Then
layout (see picture) or have index cards created with this layout frame.
Here are the same action points as above but that include the If… Then… strategy
Research has found that goals written that include an implementation intention are far more likely to be achieved.
Research references and further reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implementation_intention
Search research for implementation intention using your preferred internet search engine.
| Call to action |
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| At the end of the very next workshop you are facilitating, enhance the action planning section by asking learners to write their action points followed by If x then y to give their action points real context. |