Tag: professional development

March 18, 2018 Diversity and Inclusion

Women’s History Month Initiative – Empowering Yourself and the Women Around You

Let’s get a little personal

Below is an email I sent to the women in my life. After having numerous conversations with friends, coworkers, former coworkers, yoga buddies, you name it, I started to realize that we’re all secretly living the same life. We’re struggling with the same things but we don’t know how to voice them, share them, accept a certain level of vulnerability on the way to self-improvement. I wanted to share these words, and this opportunity with my readers.

What is this initiative and what are the benefits of joining?

First off, in case you haven’t heard this today – you’re doing great! You’re working a part time or full time job, continuing to flourish as a human being and as a woman, and you are looking for even more opportunities to improve yourself.

I’ve dubbed 2018 “The Year of the Hustle”. I’ve faced struggles over the last 3 years, encountered roadblocks that shook me, and put many of my own goals on hold to manage other situations in my life. You might be in the same place, or trying to come back from it.

I’m grateful for the discussions I’ve had with all of the women in my life and it occurs to me that we’re all looking for ways to grow personally and professionally. That type of growth is best achieved with a system of support. So I’ve added empowering the women around me as a goal. I’m starting with a Slack group to bring together like-minded individuals and build a community of continuous development. By joining, you’ll have a chance to interact with and learn from the experiences of women just like you. Participate at a level that works for you; pop in when you need help or hang out to lend a hand to new friends!

Because I want this to be a safe and truly positive space for women, access to the group is by invitation only. Do you know any women who would benefit from participating in this project? They can request an invitation by filling out this form. 

The group will focus on the following 5 topics, with additional items added as needed:

Personal and professional goals Where do you want to be and how can this group help you get there?
Money Do you want to talk about salaries, negotiations, managing money and short/long term financial goals?
Time Do you need an accountability partner to help you stay on track? Are you investing the right amount of time in yourself?
Reality checks Feeling like the world is full of trash people? Struggling to find your happy place in an increasingly tumultuous time? That’s ok! Let’s talk about what you’re seeing and how you can make an impact.
Tools Find and share tools and resources that help you keep track of everything and discover new approaches to problem solving.

I’m super excited to get started and to see what we will accomplish together!

February 18, 2018 Professional Development

Leading with Strength and Vision – A Woman’s Guide to Strategic Communication

Session Overview

Female leaders exist in all forms, from Director level to teachers in the classroom. Regardless of your title or role, there are opportunities to establish yourself as a leader in every interaction. At first, stepping up can feel overwhelming; you might be concerned about what you should or shouldn’t say, or how you come across. That uncertainty is normal and a great place to start. Before you dive into the deep end, let’s think about your end goal! Being a leader can mean different things to different people, but it all starts with authenticity. You can get your voice and ideas front and center without the fear of being seen as “that” person. It starts with knowing and owning your communication style and utilizing critical thinking skills, past experiences and empathetic practices to demonstrate your ability to foster change.

In this 1 hour session, we’ll work to identify individual leadership qualities, discuss ways to influence change in your organization, explore how to establish yourself as a leader in any organizational structure and outline how to develop emergent skills.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will have gained the ability to:

  • Discerning avenues of communication at all levels
  • Leading with respect in difficult situations
  • Standing behind your ideas
  • Alternatives to apologizing (why you’re doing it and how to stop)
  • Leveraging previous experience to position yourself as an expert within your organization

Interested in booking this workshop? Email me to get started!

October 8, 2017 Professional Development

Task Mapping – Learning New Words

In possessing fluency in the English language, educators sometimes forget how much prior knowledge is required to learn a new word.

In the last week, I’ve found myself explaining the concept of task mapping often. It’s an extremely valuable technique that can be used to break down a task into its smallest parts, allowing for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand and convey complex information within the right framework.

As a literacy tutor, I was introduced to a whole new challenge for English language learners. Within this world resides the untold story of people who speak English but cannot read or write it. They’ve learned from their friends, family, and neighbors, and in doing so, have heard words filtered through a dozen different accents and grammatical structures. So when we, as ELL teachers, ask a student to learn to read and write a language they know aurally, we are asking for so much more than stringing letters together.

To illustrate what this means, I’ve put together the following worksheet. I encourage you to try it out, especially if your first language is English.

I also challenge you implement task mapping when you are designing new trainings or asking someone to complete a new task. I would also encourage you to watch the 2016 film Arrival, which discusses the complexities of language and what each interaction means for the future of humans and our ability to communicate with each other.

[pdf-embedder url=”http://sam-barrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Task-Mapping-Learning-New-Words.pdf” title=”Task Mapping- Learning New Words”]

 

April 30, 2017 Tools for Success

Telling Ain’t Training – Pt 6: Technology Integration

Overview

During this final post, I’ll cover the potential benefits of integrating technology in training. There are several considerations, most importantly the impact they can have on the efficacy of the training. Stolovitch and Keeps summarize these factors in saying,

When it comes to training efficiency, the measure is fast and cheap. When it comes to training and effectiveness, the measure is how well the learning goal is achieved.

Telling Ain’t Training, pg 181

Technology can help to meet these two metrics, as long as you understand that the use of technology to deliver content does not replace solid training design. The use of technology in training “can enable efficiency” if properly implemented. It can also take a turn towards gimmicky if the use isn’t well thought out or well executed.

Working at a tech education company and matrix managing dispersed teams, leveraging technology is a constant part of our everyday. When I started, I was onboarded to dozens of systems with no real explanation to why or, really, their uses. Some stuck because of their prevalence (Slack, for example) and/or their functionality (Google Docs). A few systems have found their want into my personal life, most notably in my Instructional Resources Trello board. I’ve continued to explore our current technologies in order to leverage and expand our utilization of existing resources, including leading remote workshops using shared Google Slides decks and Zoom video software. I’ve even tried my hand at using a free LMS, Latitude Learning, to start hosting content.

As you can see, the list of technologies you can incorporate into training can get really long, really fast, and we haven’t even included the old standbys like Adobe Acrobat, the Microsoft Suite, Google Hangouts, Survey Monkey, and services like Moodle. With all of these ‘productivity tools’ floating around, it’s helpful to have a framework around what they can do to assist and then start narrowing down your specific use case.

What can you get out of integrating technology?

Chapter 10 of Telling Ain’t Training focuses on the use of technology in trainings, why you might consider using them and some of the caveats you must face. There’s a great chart on pages 184-186 (which I’ve summarized below) that outlines the potential benefits of trainings. I also encourage you to read that chapter to find out why promises around increased productivity and reduced costs from outside vendors may be too good to be true.

Potential Benefits What it means
Accessibility  Anyone can access it from anywhere, can help reach remote teams and provide opportunity to train people requiring accessibility accommodations
Instantaneous response and feedback  Instructors and participants and contact each other and receive near instantaneous responses; allows for automatic responses or feedback based on preset criteria
Instantaneous testing and feedback  Testing can be hosted and created within certain platforms – this is especially true of multiple choice questions, or trainings in which the program is both synchronous and asynchronous
Consistency of message  Templates, training and one delivery platform can result in a more consistent message that can be monitored and maintained by a relatively small team
Rapidity of delivery  It can reduce the need to coordinate in-person trainings; eliminated the need to schedule spaces and allow for people to join when needed
Simultaneity of training delivery  It can provide a platform to provide one training to a large number of participants
Ease of update Since all resources would live within a system or platform, it can reduce versioning issues often seen with static documents; updates can be pushed at one time to ensure everyone gets it at the same time
Reusability  Trainings can be delivered over and over again without a reset period; content can be repurposed for other trainings
Flexibility of use  Utilize all of pieces of a platform, use it for all or part of the training, use it for different types of training, hosts modules, pathways etc for different types of content.
Interactivity  Include audio, video, slides, Prezis, responsive tests and websites
Adaptability Depending on the platform, content can be changed (scaled, updated, amended, appended) to fit into other trainings/programs; , provide dynamic content that responds to learners needs

The absolute most important thing you must remember is that these benefits are conditional. They aren’t guaranteed and are heavily reliant on your current resources, your company’s infrastructure, setup costs – including training of internal users and onboarding – and time constraints, among a volley of other factors. For these reasons, content rather than delivery method should be the deciding factor in whether a piece of a technology should be incorporated into a program.

April 29, 2017 Tools for Success

Telling Ain’t Training – Pt 5: Training in a Collaborative Workplace

I’m going to tell you a not-so-secret. Training adults is a game of social circles and politics. At one of my employers, training required a lot of buy in from different groups and participants generally wanted to fell like they were actively contributing to the event, rather than be on the receiving end of a final product. The dynamic can be challenging – how can you have a training if the people being trained believe that they know all there is to know?

There are a couple of things at play here. In today’s business environment, it’s all about your title and your tenure. If you’re not in a management position, it can be hard to get people to follow your lead. I’ll save my leadership lessons for later but for the purpose of this post, we’ll focus on the idea of collaborating with participants to deliver a successful training.

Chapter 8 of Stolovich and Keeps’s Telling Ain’t Training presents 25 scenarios you can use to add practical application to your trainings. I was planning an upcoming workshop around managing student concerns on campus and was excited to try some of them out. I flipped through each of them, eager to try something new. As I skimmed the exercises, I realized that none of them would work for me.

Why?

Because our team, dispersed across 15 cities and 3 continents, knows what they’re doing and they don’t want someone trying to get them to learn something by rote. What this book presents is, in it’s truest form, training. Reading through the scenario, I realized that what I wanted was a workshop. I wanted an event that had true learner participation and had a tangible end result.

I ended up with the a format that was predominantly learner led with me giving confirming and/or corrective feedback and taking notes when someone brought up a suggestion that aligned with best practices. In addition to having participants share out and complete two practical application exercises, I also asked them to ‘help’ me come up with a guide that others can use to apply the standards set during this workshop to any situation.

Participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I felt confident that they would be able to immediately implement their learning in their day to day responsibilities. Further more, the deck is available for reference and a recorded version will be made so that remote campuses will be able to provide the workshop asynchronously.

April 23, 2017 Tools for Success

Utilizing Confirming and Corrective Feedback

A Familiar Scenario

Imagine you spent an entire weekend writing a paper for your Instructional Design course. It’s a lot of work and you’re unfamiliar with the content. You dedicate a few hours to reviewing the syllabus, assignment description and resources and you feel pretty confident in your final result.

When you get the grades back, you’re shocked to see a C+ next to your name. Under the feedback section, you get the following comment from your instructor:

“You’re just not getting it. Reread the diagram on page 2 and then resubmit.”

As the learner, take a moment to jot down your internal reactions and external actions. I’ve shared mine in this chart:

External Actions Internal Reactions
Reread the syllabus Confusion
Revisit the diagram Frustration
Contact the instructor for clarification
Demotivation
Email classmates to ask them for help Resentment

Looking at the internal reactions, we can see that escalated quickly, didn’t it? I’m sure the instructor didn’t mean to imply that I, the learner, hadn’t done my due diligence in reading all relevant materials, but that’s what it feels like. I might reach out to other participants to discuss my confusion only to find that they felt the same way. A picture begins to emerge – one of miscommunication that, when repeated, can quickly snowball into a negative learning experience.

This example is applicable to any educational setting and is indicative of a few areas of contention that I have experience as both a learner and an educator. We’ll break down the example the statement to find out why it fails to be useful.

This statement implies that there is a flaw with the learner that prohibits them from grasping the content. It’s a variation of the old “try harder”, as if effort alone is all it takes to learn. Additionally, as described in a previous post, it can feel like a personal attack.

What’s not to love? It tells the learner where to look, which some might categorize as a helpful hint. The problem here is that the instructor doesn’t acknowledge their responsibility to expand on or further clarify the instructions. If the learner stared at the diagram for thirty additional minutes, would that somehow influence her comprehension? Should the instructor provide more context or other support to ensure the learner understands the content and that they remain motivated throughout the course or session?
The answer is yes, that is exactly the hallmark of a good educator and, if you’re prepped appropriately for the topic you’re teaching, it doesn’t take much to make adjustments.

Corrective and Confirming Feedback

Using the same scenario as above, imagine if you received this feedback instead:

Not quite, but you’re on the right track. You’ve done a good job of explaining x but y is missing. I recommend reading resources 1 and 2 again and using z to frame your answer.”
It takes a few more words, sure, but it accomplishes several things:
  • Sets a positive tone
  • Call out of what is right (because no one likes to be wrong all the time!)
  • Calls out areas of improvement (after the praise)
  • Suggests concrete ways to improve
  • Provides additional resources and/or context

Using a combination of corrective and confirming feedback empowers students to explore topics independently, while looking to instructors/facilitators/trainers to provide guidance and support. This doesn’t mean that you, the educator, needs to handhold, coddle or give all of the answers away. Instead, it shows that you respect your learners and their ability to learn in ways that are best for them, as well as showing your support for their educational journey.

Think of the last time you learned a new and complex topic. If someone had offered guiding tips and suggestions that help you relate the content to something you already know or frame it within the context of your current life, wouldn’t that have made the experience not only more enjoyable but more effective?

What do you think? Have you used corrective and/or confirming feedback? What have been the results? As a learner, what type of feedback are you used to receiving and how does it influence your learning experience?

April 21, 2017 Tools for Success

Telling Ain’t Training – Pt 3: Training the Right Way

Overview

The first two posts in this series talk about what we generally encounter as trainers – what we might define as failures in ourselves or our learners. I also cover a few techniques you can quickly in implement for existing trainings or those instances when you need to supplement content. This chapter and post focus on building the correct foundation to avoid those altogether.
Take a moment to consider the quote above.
What does it mean? In essence, there are a set of guidelines that allow us to build effective trainings independent of the learning styles of participants. Let’s take a look at what they are.

Six Guidelines for Creating Successful Trainings

The Why We’ve talked about this quite a few times but it bears repeating. Learners need to know why they’re learning the content. If he/she/they places high value on the training and content, they are more likely to engage and retain information.
The What Do you know what you’re teaching? Can you articulate this what using specific learning objectives? They should be listed on the course description. Maybe on the syllabus or in the classroom. This sets of end goal for you and your learners.
The Structure “Humans seek order (pg 75)” is something I have come to realize working in operations and even more so as an educator. Order allows participants to quickly grasp patterns as well as connect previously held knowledge to newly-learned information.
The Response How do you plan to add interactions your sessions? Response refers to the way in which learner’s respond to learning the content you’re presenting. According to research, as well as Stolovitch and Keeps, this can take the form of “answering a question filling in a blank labeling something solving a problem making a decision or even discussing and arguing (pg 76)”.
The Feedback Feedback is information that learners receive about how on or off target they are. It comes from the facilitator or instructor, or from other environmental components (e.g. think about a chemical reaction during a science experiment or a red ‘x’ or green check mark during an online quiz). Research indicates that feedback should be immediately relevant to the task. Personal criticism, perceived or otherwise, decreases performance. Additionally, it should also be timely frequent and specific.
The Reward What does the learner get for successfully completing a task? Rewards work the same way as they did in childhood; they motivate learners to continue a desired behavior. The actual reward will vary but as long as a reward is perceived as valuable to the learner it will be a successful tool for a motivation

 

April 16, 2017 Tools for Success

Telling Ain’t Training – Pt 2: Blame Isn’t the Solution

You’re Really Good at That! (Or How You Become a Trainer)

When I took my first position as a trainer over 10 years ago, I had no idea how complex it would be. In hindsight I can see how ill-prepared I was to create meaningful trainings. This isn’t to say they were terrible or ineffective, or that I wasn’t good at my job. It does mean that I had a lot to learn. Like many of you, my first job as a trainer resulted from being identified as an ‘expert’ in what I did. The criteria for this varies, but in most cases, your manager is impressed by the work you’re doing or you’ve been doing it so long that you know all the ins and outs of a system, process or business. In some industries you’re called a subject matter expert (SME). In others, your title might include Lead, Head or another similar attribute. These are words that signal that you’re well-versed in your craft. By being labeled any of these, you’ve been selected to pass your knowledge and methods on to the ‘next generation’ or maybe even your peers.

I’m Good at My Job, I Swear

You’re excited and you have tons of ideas, tips and tricks to share. You sit down and think about all of the things that make you good at your job. The final outcome is a training outline or version 1 of a training manual. Armed with your knowledge and any class resources you’ve put together, you deliver your first training session and…you bomb.
Your audience is confused, you’re frustrated and everyone is resentful of what they perceive as time wasted.
You take a moment to reflect, attempting to figure out what went wrong. I’ve been there, believe me. In these situations, our minds can start to use blame as a way to rationalize everything.
Maybe I’m not that good at my job or perhaps Simon just wasn’t trying hard enough. Our brains lead us to believe that somewhere along the lines, someone messed up.
This isn’t entirely untrue, but it assumes that the failure was a result of a person, rather than a system. If we remove you (the person) and the learners as the root cause of the failure, then you are left with content and delivery. Let’s start by looking at the three critical components of communication when designed a training.

Where’s the Breakdown?

The first two, defined by Stolovitch and Keeps as declarative and procedural knowledge, constitute the majority of your content. The third is the idea of Adult Learning principles and it deals with how you choose to relay those first two components to your audience.
  • Procedural: You process customer returns everyday for 2 years. It’s second nature to key in code 555 in order to bypass the three standard welcome screens. It takes nothing at all to complete the entire logging and refund event in 3 minutes. This is procedural knowledge. You can think of it as all of the manual tasks you can complete without thinking about it. For me, a good example is knitting a washcloth.

Take a moment and think about a task that you can do without putting too much thought into it. This excludes things like breathing and blinking!

  • Declarative: Now if I asked you to talk me through, how accurate do you think your first try will be? How long to do you think it will take you to describe it so that I can replicate the process flawlessly? The is called declarative knowledge.
Many experts (like you and me) rely on procedural knowledge to do our jobs. Translating procedural knowledge into declarative knowledge often breaks down, which can lead to that familiar feeling of failure for both parties.
To further complicate this, in trying to teach others to work the way that we work, we sometimes forget that adults have their own feelings and experiences related to learning new things. We can’t just say ‘do it exactly this’ and not expect push back, especially from those who have already done the job before.

 How Can I Improve My Trainings?

  • According to the authors of Telling Ain’t Training, an effective way to set the stage for your trainings is to address positive and negative experiences related to the topic at the start of the session. This will:
    • Diffuse a situation by acknowledging past experiences of the participants and
    • Allow you to gauge what participants know and how they approach problem solving.
  • Establish the why and how of the trainings. As discussed in other posts, relevance is extremely important to adult learners. They need to know why they are learning this content and how it can be immediately applied to make their jobs easier and/or more efficient. You also want to discuss how they’ll be learning to do these things.
  • Here’s where the Adult Learning Principles come in:
    • Integrate real world scenarios as a way to demonstrate practical application to your learners. This also allows them to participate and share their experiences in similar situations.
    • Include a resource list that participants can refer back to. This can include detailed (or simplified!) explanations of content covered during the course, or further reading related to the topic.
    • Consider Task Mapping – During an Instructional Design course I took in graduate school, I chose to create a training for managers based on their job description. The posting included things like ‘budgeting’ but because many people are promoted into the position, it’s not an inherent skill. By task mapping, I was able to uncover assumed prerequisite knowledge and build from that level before moving onto budgeting; for example, an understanding of financial terminology, a intermediate grasp of Excel and formulas and understanding of profit margins.

The next time you design a training, clearly define what you need to teach your learners and then use the suggestions above to decide how you’re going to do it. Throughout the process, be conscious of what you’re doing vs what you’re saying when outlining or developing content. Read it out loud to yourself and, if possible, ask someone else (a non-SME) to follow along. If they can’t, rework the areas where they get stuck until you have a resource that is thorough but easy to understand and follow along.

Stay tuned for my next post which explores the best ways to build a strong foundation for all your training needs!

February 25, 2017 Diversity and Inclusion, Professional Development

Exploring Diversity to Engage in Meaningful Conversation

Diversity is more than a word; it’s a conversation. It requires definition, context, perspective. It has been applied to groups, to initiatives, to companies, to food, to ecosystems. Diversity can and does mean so many different things that in this day and social media age, it’s all but a prerequisite to unpack the term before you can ever begin talking about it.

I took a multi-culture and diversity course while completing my graduate degree. The first assignment consisted of completing a 2 sided diversity wheel that asked about you as a person and you as a construct. I know, I know, but stick with me. We were paired randomly with a partner and then asked to share as much as we felt comfortable sharing. At the end, we wrote brief introductions of our partner and shared it with the rest of the class.

I learned a few things about myself, things that I’ll likely discuss in another in-depth post. More importantly, I learned a great deal about the assumptions that are made when talking to other human beings. For example, by some accounts, our species is all we have in common. By others, looking alike is all it takes to be alike.

As a member of my company’s ERG program, I was finding it difficult to get real, deep, and frankly uncomfortable, conversation going. We were going in circles, talking about ‘us’ as women, as one homogeneous group that shares the same experiences. To some degree, that’s the truth. I’ve been cat-called, I’ve been judged for my gender, I’ve been challenged because of it. I also know, however, that my experience as a woman of color, as a person who is on a different education or career track, as someone who grew up in NYC, means that I don’t necessarily share the same perspective as the woman sitting next to me. This doesn’t make one of us better than the other but ignoring these differences can divide us.

Below is a workshop I delivered in a small group setting. I’ve expanded the initial exercise to open up conversations about what diversity and culture are, as well as to have participants identify their own knowledge gaps and look for ways to further explore them.

February 5, 2017 Tools for Success

Understanding Your Learner

This is the first in a series building on the core concepts explored in Telling Ain’t Training. Click here to read the rest of the series.

Understanding Your Learner – What’s Your Approach?

When designing trainings, how often have you considered the learner? And in what capacity? Do you think about your delivery method? What about the classroom environment? A dozen things might go through your mind as you work off of your mental checklist. Before we get there let’s take a moment to think a little differently about what training means and align on what it should accomplish.

Telling Ain’t Training starts with a few key points centered around understanding your learners before they even step foot into your classroom, chief among them the tenant that we should be building trainings for the needs of the learners; investigating their roles, responsibilities and prior experience in order to build content that’s meaningful and relevant for them.

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

According to the authors, what we do falls into three categories:

  • Training – Is the goal to teach participants how to complete a step-by-step task?
  • Instruction – Is the goal to teach participants how to react in a situation with one or more variables?
  • Education – A culmination of life experiences and learning principles that go beyond reproducing or inferring; the road to expertise.
The purpose of training, instruction and education is to transform the learner, not transmit data. We want the learner to be able to apply what has been communicated and not just repeat it back.

Find Your Center of Focus

There’s a maxim repeated at the beginning of the book – educators must be “learner centered, performance based.” This encompasses not just your delivery but also the content you build, where you build it, and how you interact with participants. Lose sight of this and you risk losing your credibility and your learner’s interest and respect.

Learner Centered Means Adapting

How we learn is part of our genetic make up. Garden’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences tells us that we need to negotiate different senses and learning types in order to really make teachings stick. The question is how to cater to an audience you’ve never met. Educators can take advantage of what we know about the human body to build flexible courses that are designed to engage different types of learners.

Think About It!

Humans can store massive amounts of data. The issue lies in retrieving it. Assuming that it’s relevant to the learner, then organization is the key. Consider the acronym PEMDAS and the mnemonics My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Can you remember what they mean? If the answer is yes, when was the last time you needed to use that information? Chances are you haven’t consciously thought about either in a long time but the information still lives on. That’s the power of organization coupled with effective teaching and the human brain.

This, of course, doesn’t mean the classes where we learned these pieces of info were perfect but rather that someone stumbled upon a great memory technique that may or may not have translated into other parts of the curriculum. For example, I can’t readily recall most of what I learned in Earth Science but I vividly remember Algebra. The teacher included hands on and group activities, employed a reward system and used visuals and audio cues to draw connections between prior knowledge and newer, more complex pieces of information.

Put it in practice!

Make a list of ways you can engage your audience. Include exercises and content that appeal to the following:
  • Musical-rhythmic and harmonic.
  • Visual-spatial.
  • Verbal-linguistic.
  • Logical-mathematical.
  • Bodily-kinesthetic