Bloom - ers

Talking about learning has been a feature of much of my life at present. I am moving jobs at work so currently trying to pass on my collective knowledge. Now the aim of these session was to give a quick half hour of the key messages. Today was part two, of delivering some peer training to my team about thinking about writing training materials. In the past few years, I have updated and completed all the projects around training resources, and over the last few months my team have been given the next round to do, with me being the expert!

I have talked before about the approach we take to our training. The fact that it is split into two elements - what we call the learning and the validation parts - a bit like AM and PM. (acquire then participates? although already we seemed to have separated them out). We also look at what we want from an individual at the end. What's the outcome - what should they be able to do, what should they know, and how should they feel?

 

                                       

 The first part of my peer training was focused the learner and the subject. The activities I ran were designed to get them thinking about a number of things. My first activity asked what kind of things they like, and how do they like to learn. I give them a number of examples and they hold up happy sad or not sure faces. This activity is designed to get them thinking both internally and externally and realising that even in the room people like different things. When we design learning, it can't just be designing the things we like to do - not everyone is like us . (thank goodness!).

I then run a even sillier activity, where I split them into pairs. I get them to pick out a topic from a pack of cards. I like to have a mix of topics - like: the best things about being a frog; how to make a cup of tea; the life and times of oliver twist; why rock music is cool.... I then ask them to come up with the top five messages/points about these subjects. After they have spent five minutes doing this, they get to pick another card- this time their audience. This includes people like the territorial army, teenage girls, scientists, the local WI....you get the drift. And then they have to think about this audience and then tailor the subject to what they think the audience might want to know and the method that they think should be used to convey this information. Now this is geared more towards the presentation than training, but the principles are the same.

What is it you need them to know, and what is it they think they need to know.

By thinking about you audience, or learners, who they are, how they act, misconceptions about them, you can start to think about how you make the topic relevant and interesting for them. I then ask them to think about breaking down that topic into knowledge, skills and behaviours.

At the end of this session I also did a bit about what you can and can't cover in a training session and show how some of our current training objectives can't be met! After all, they will be writing the objectives.

Part 2. So this week was part two - the method. I realised while preparing, and also while doing the research on learning this week, that  a lot of our training is based on blooms taxonomy. So this week we looked at blooms - although, probably not as in depth as some might like. The aim of the session? For them to realise that some methods might be more appropriate to the outcomes than others. And also that training should be progressive. Now the youth programme in scouting is meant to be challenging and progressive - so surely training should be too.

Blooms taxonomy is really useful in this as each of the areas, cognitive, psycho-motor and affective (knowledge , skills , behaviour) as the theory has levels of development.

So firstly we did an activity in which I gave them about thirty verbs and they had to decide whether the verb was cognitive, psycho - motor or affective (although I used the terms knowledge, skills, behaviour.) We then looked at a number of different methods(lecture, case study, game, demonstration etc) and talked about which of the areas could be covered in this method. So for example, a demonstration might a skill, but for those on the periphery, it could be knowledge. We then took the three areas one step further, and I introduced them to the theory around the stages of blooms. Basically, one needs to master the lower stages before you can move onto the next. You can't understand without knowledge. You can't apply skills to different situations without first mastering it yourself...etc.

  So why is this important? Because in a training situation, you can't ask people to do the complicated stuff if they haven't mastered the lower levels. However, if you make people do only the lower level stuff, and they already know that, they will get frustrated or bored. The point was, that you need to design training to be challenging and progressive, without losing the interaction and the real life examples that allow people to 'learn'.

So why is all this important. Because this week we are talking about learning. And although blooms doesn't cover it all, this is what I live. It's about becoming, it's about progression, it's about the learner identity as much as it's about a content. Because, all my study this week, made it much easier to say this IS a way to do things.