Learning
Training Exercises and Resources

This is a handy end-of-the-course exercise that helps reinforce learning by reminding the delegates of what they have learned during the course. A summary is produced during this exercise which can also be used as a reference for delegates.

At the end of each training session, it is ideal to test delegate’s knowledge about the topics covered during the session. You can make the process more entertaining by making the test feel like a game. You can apply the questioning format presented here to test delegates’ knowledge about a given topic. The only requirement is that you need to prepare a number of questions before the course.

Imagine attending a training course which at the time you thought was fine and covered a good range of content that you didn’t know about. Sometime later, your colleague asks you about the course and to your shock you realise that you cannot remember much about it. It feels as if it was years ago that you’ve attended it even though it was only a month ago. Funny enough, you remember that you thought at the time that it was actually a good course; it was very informative. You explain this to your colleague but you cannot help wondering why you don’t remember much of the course or the actual content covered. Of course you don’t share this part with your colleague. You don’t want him to think that your memory is poor or worst that you wasted company resources by attending a course that you didn’t get much from.

You put it to your hectic workload and think nothing of it. You finish off your conversation with your colleague as you need to press on with the next meeting…

What is going on? Are training courses supposed to be like this or is there something more fundamental taking place? Or, to ask the question in a different way, as a trainer is there something you can do to avoid the above eventuality?

As a successful trainer, you must be able to perform at your best every time you provide a training course. Your aim is not only to teach a given subject to delegates, but to also entertain them and make the event more memorable. So in order to boost your delegate’s learning, you need to be a good entertainer as well as a fantastic educator.

Your performance as a trainer is also observed by your client or the training agency that you work with. Therefore each training course is an opportunity for you to advertise your skills.

Trying to be an entertainer and educator is not easy and can put a lot of demand on you. If due to your previous success you have lined up a complex schedule of training courses, you need to make sure you stay sharp and focused for every single training delivery.

Here, you will be introduced to 6 powerful methods that can help you stay in shape mentally and have a successful delivery every time.

Research has long shown that visualisation can lead to better recall and learning. As a trainer, you can exploit visualisation to your advantage. One area where visualisation is useful is when recapping on content already covered or at the end of a course. This exercise helps you to take advantage of the power of visualisation.

The visualisation produced in this exercise can also act as a reminder for the delegates and will help to reinforce associations and memory.

During a training course several topics are often covered. Each of these topics leads to a number of actions that will help improve delegates’ behaviour or skills in the future.

However, many of these actions might not be carried out. After the course, delegates can easily get carried away by other demands on their time and soon the ideas explored in the course will be forgotten.

In order to help delegates apply the learning from course to their lives you can get them to commit to certain actions and increase the likelihood that they will engage in specific post-course activities to reinforce learning.

This exercise helps delegates identify what might stop them from committing to the tasks and identify solutions for each obstacle. The exploration of these obstacles is fun and the exercise helps to motivate delegates in following up with actions after the course.

Ideally, you should run this exercise at the end of the course just before recap and end-of-course summary.

This exercise helps to refresh delegates’ memory about what you just taught them. It encourages them to think about the training lessons covered so far and make a few statements about what they have learned. Specifically, it allows delegates to draw up a number of actions to do after the course to get more from the lessons.

Ideally you should run this exercise just before going to a tea or lunch break. It helps to summarise the points covered in the current lesson or all previous lessons (depending on your choice) and also acts as a closing exercise on a particular topic.

We all know from experience that there seems to be a connection between reward and learning. We see it clearly in children; “Honey, you can watch one more hour of TV tonight if you clean your room.” The child now has an incentive to clean his room.

In fact, you can find this reward system used everywhere even in adults’ world. Many companies have a bonus system to motivate employees to work harder. Prizes and awards are given out on just about any skill that can be measured. In short, rewards seem to have a great part in motivating and teaching people.

Why rewards work? Why a person’s behaviour changes when his actions are rewarded? How does this work inside the brain? And above all, how can you use rewards when training people to reinforce learning?

Let’s start with reward seeking behaviour of humans. In 1959 it was discovered that a neurotransmitter called dopamine (DA) is strongly involved in control of movements. Since then studies have been conducted that have identified the critical role of dopamine in the brain reward system (Arias-Carrion and Poppel 2007).

Interestingly, research also shows that dopamine deficiencies can lead to a number of serious diseases such as Parkinson, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

On the other side of the scale, dopamine is also central to drug abuse and addiction.

Some have also associated dopamine with our cognitive development and how we managed to become intelligent as we evolved (Previc 1999).

With so much significance, let’s see how dopamine can relate to learning and how we can take advantage of what it offers.

It is easy to come across statements that sound scientific or logical. It is one thing to hear them; another to pass them on as a trainer. Unfortunately, over the years a few statements seem to have been repeated so many times in the training industry that people no longer question where they actually came from. These statements are no longer valid; they are simply accepted because they are heard from so many different sources. In short, people seem to be relying on social proof much more than rational proof.

Here, you will be introduced to a few common statements that are repeatedly shared in the training industry but with further scrutiny don’t live up to their promise.

Andragogy is essentially the science of understanding lifelong adult learning. The theory was developed by Malcolm Knowles in 1960s and the term has since come to name the field of adult learning.

Like all theories on learning, your understanding of where they come from and what they cover can help you improve your training and benefit from each theory’s insight into the area of training.

Fundamentally, adult learning is different from child learning, or pedagogy. This article explores the differences between adult education and child education helping you improve your training.