Subject: [Master Facilitator Journal] Working with diverse skill levels - December12, 2006
Master
Facilitator Journal | Issue #0282, December 12, 2006 ....
Dear
friends,
It's not often that we deliver workshops to groups who possess perfectly
uniform skills sets, learning styles, and abilities. People have diverse
levels of skill and learn different things at different rates. Didactic
training styles designed to infuse information from trainer to student
can leave some people behind while others are bored and ready to move
on. In this week's article, "Working
with diverse skill levels," we explore strategies to resolve
this issue.
Check
out our full collection of self-guided, pre-recorded teleclasses complete
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Working
With Diverse Skill Levels
How to make your workshop work for everyone
Group
Process Skill
It's not often that we deliver workshops to groups who possess perfectly
uniform skills sets, learning styles, and abilities. People have diverse
levels of skill and learn different things at different rates. Didactic
training styles designed to infuse information from trainer to student
can leave some people behind while others are bored and ready to move
on.
This phenomenon is even more pronounced when delivering workshops to public
groups whose participants represent a broad cross section of cultural,
intellectual, and experiential backgrounds. So how do we deal with this
issue? Here are some quick suggestions.
Application
Train to multiple senses. Some people may be lagging due to their
preferred method of receiving and processing information. Seek to deliver
material in various modes to appeal to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic
senses. This approach not only satisfy different learning styles, incorporating
multiple sense helps to improve learning, retention, and integration for
everyone.
Tune into multiple learning channels. There are always going to
be people in your group who are ahead of the rest in some way. If they
have relevant experience, knowledge, or wisdom to share and they can share
it in an articulate manner, use them as resources. Enlist these experts
to share what they know with your group. This approach does at least two
things: 1) It helps the experts increase their mastery of the material
by teaching or expressing it, and 2) It helps the other participants by
hearing the same or additional material from alternative perspectives.
Be a Learning Facilitator. Functioning in the fashion just described
requires you to be more a conductor than a director; a facilitator of
learning versus a one-way channel of information. This approach takes
the burden off of you to be the sole expert in the room but it requires
more of you to design flexible learning processes, faith in yourself that
you can orchestrate these processes as they arise, and faith that appropriate
learning will "emerge" from within your group.
Action
How
can you adapt your training approach to deal with the diversity in skill
levels? Please click reply and share your comments. I'd love to hear from
you.
Micro
Skills Tele-Seminar
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