Learning by doing
Jim Belshaw commented:
I think that I would add learning by doing on the experiential side.
This is always good in a general sense, especially so where the exercise involves an on-going process. To make this work, you need to build in the culture and process elements up front.
This is true, both for facilitating training and for facilitating a group at work. Learning by doing is an explicit part of the adult and action learning principles used in the ToP™ Facilitative Leadership Program. Hence the flow of each Module starts with a demonstration of the subject, explores the theory & dynamics and then each participant gets to have a go.
With an ongoing process, the group can see a facilitation method and its variations in action. They can thus start to see through to what makes that process tick. Through consistently matching actions to words, the facilitator is “walking the walk”.
January 7th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Noting the ToP comment, one of the interesting features of any well run training course is the way it teaches process skills over and beyond the immediate object of the course.
Tom Schwarz (Kinnogene and also a ToP practioner) and I were talking about this during the week in the context of effective delegation.
Many professionals are lousy delegators. If you want them to improve you have to give them the overall principles plus the required analytical job or task analysis skills. But all this falls down if the professional cannot communicate effectively.
Okay, you can build this into the course. But the course itself, the way it is run, is also a communications experience. That is, there has to be a congruence between the way you approach the training and the objective of the training.