How to Make Your Training Much More Effective and Interactive

A lot of training today is based around PowerPoint, with a good deal of text on each slide. It has become, in essence, a PowerPoint presentation with an occasional detour of getting participants to create lists of ideas on a flipchart or a pin board. It is an exercise in transferring knowledge without any verification if anything was really learned. True learning must demonstrate some new or improved performance. But the standard presentation-lecture is usually very ineffective at transferring practical skills knowledge to learners. Millions of hours are spent worldwide on a method that doesn’t work with most learners.

How should we then train?

The lecture – presentation method of training scores quite low when measured in terms of knowledge retention. If this is so, then why do so many trainers use it? Partly because this is the way they learned themselves. We tend to use the methods that were used on us. Fora Train the Trainer program (online or on site), that teaches you the art of designing interactive training modules, it will require moving beyond the narrow confines of simply presenting information – and an occasional brainstorming session. It will require you to fully engage your participants in a holistic cycle of learning, which will involve gap analysis simulations, experiential activities, varied approaches to giving input, reflection, anchoring practice, testing and realistic application activities. In other words, participants have to be fully involved with the material they’re learning. And they have to interact with it through a variety of learning methods that they can then use in their own trainings. Antrain the trainerseminar in Deutschlandwill guide participants step-by-step in developing material for every stage of the learning cycle.

What about PowerPoint?

Atrain the trainer online seminar will also guide participants in how to use PowerPoint and other visual-support material in a way that is truly visually oriented. That means, users of PowerPoint have to understand how the brain is hard-wired to “see” information and then develop visuals that are consistent with that cognitive hard-wiring. Visuals will need to be visual and not text based. This seems obvious. Nevertheless, over 80% of all trainings use text on over 80% of their slides which totally overloads the learner. The mind simply cannot process too much text without crashing. Leaving aside the abundance of research that substantiates this, it is enough to ask yourself, how successful are you at processing text slides when someone is presenting information to you? How long does it take before you get bored, irritated, and can no longer focus, let alone forget what the slide was about? For most people, learning from text slides is a futile endeavor. The basic rule of using visual support is this: it should make complex or complicated ideas easier to understand. They can’t make it more difficult – which is what text slides do. They should be visual and memorable, and if possible, pleasant to look at.

Conclusion

If you are a trainer who would like to raise the effectiveness of your training to a significantly higher level, then try to find an advanced Train the trainer skills seminar (in English or German) that shows you how to structure you own training in ways that involve and engage your participants in interactive learning. It should be a train-the-trainer course(online or on site) that takes you beyond the standard lecture and moderation method, to one that helps you design experiential and interactive training modules. For more information, contact info@ip-academy.de.