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Learners Create The Challenge

As training facilitators, we often take a huge learning opportunity away from our learners by asking questions. I know what you’re thinking, “But that’s part of our job, to ask questions.” Well, let’s just think about it.

Let’s imagine you’ve just learned something and someone ask you a question. You either know the answer or you don’t. It’s as simple as that. But let’s imagine you’d just learned something and then have to generate a quiz to test another person; that would be much more difficult because you’d have to:

• Reflect upon what you’ve learned.
• Think about what you want to ask.
• Think about the answer you expect.
• Piece the information together in your brain to help form the questions.
• Turn that into a coherent set of questions.

Much more complex than simply answering a question. In other words, to ask a question, you’d have to really use what you’d just learned. It’s that _playing with_ new information that is the embedding and learning part of the process.

So let’s apply this to your workshops. Let’s assume learners have just uncovered content (either skill or knowledge).

Team Quiz

• Ask learners to form teams. Ideally you will have 3 teams.
• Ask learners to generate x number of questions, based upon what they’ve just learned, to challenge another team (I usually say 2 questions, one easier and one trickier).
• Allow time for teams to generate their questions.
• Let learners know how the quiz will work eg team 1 will ask team 2 a question, they can confer before offering their answer. If there is any dispute about the answer given and the expected answer, team 3 will have the final say. This keeps all teams involved throughout the quiz. It’s then team two’s turn to ask their question to team 3 with team one having the final say etc.
• Facilitate the quiz.

Remember, the quiz itself is just for fun, the real embedding of the learning takes place while the teams generate their quiz.

Case Study

Rather than you spending time creating case studies and scenario, have your learners do this. Again, it’s pretty straight forward to work through a case study, but to create one, you really have to know the content and context of the information and then use that to create a coherent case study.

• Ask learners to form teams. Ideally you will have 3 teams.
• Ask teams to generate a case study for another team to complete, based upon what they’ve just uncovered.
• Allow time for teams to generate their case studies.
• Ask each team to pass their case study to another team.
• Teams work through the case study they have just received.
• When teams have completed the case study they received, ask them to pass it to the thrid team to evaluate their answer.

By rotating 3 times, teams:

• Create a case study or scenario.
• Answer a different case study.
• Evaluate a third case study.

An added bonus here is, you don’t need to spend time creating the quizzes and case studies. 

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