Encouraging Personal Growth through Scavenger Hunts

Building Experiences is holding a Youth Conference in January and we’re hashing out the structure of the weekend. One student has been vociferously requesting a scavenger hunt so I’ve been trying to figure out an authentic way to include her request in the weekend’s agenda. The scavenger hunt is still in development, but here are some creative ways that I’ve been thinking about modifying the structure:

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Unpacking my White Privilege

Tuesday night, I attended “I Can’t Breathe”: An Open Forum on Black Pain, Racial Justice and Healing. A breadth of speakers spoke about their experiences, specifically in our town and our university. I am writing in response to that great meeting, and as a challenge to my readers, particularly my white, Charlottesville-dwelling readers to Do More, and Be Better.

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Conference Commonalities: Ladies Arm Wrestling & Youth Development

A bit over two weeks ago I had the most affirming and wonderful weekend spent with over 50 women (and a handful of men). We came together in Washington, DC to hold a nation wide conference, and an interleague arm wrestling championship. For 6 years, I’ve been involved with CLAW, Charlottesville Ladies Arm Wrestling, and more recently, CLAW USA, the national coalition.

This weekend represented a shift in my thinking about CLAW. Continue reading

A Week (+ 1) In Pictures

When my brain is too full of words to process, I must resort to pictures. This week has been so amazingly full, inspiring and life-affirming, I haven’t even been able to begin filing it appropriately. Enjoy these pictures of so many amazing people!

High school sophmores and juniors receive French tutoring from UVA French major.

11/10 High school sophomores and juniors receive French tutoring from UVA French major.

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The Rookie’s Guide to Ed Theory: Bloom’s Taxonomy

Guess what? You’re probably training someone right now! Are you a shift manager at a restaurant, are you a parent, or will you be working alongside a new hire? Yes? Trainer, trainer, trainer!! This is an occasional series to introduce you to important educational constructs.

Bloom’s Taxonomy
or It’s more than just “understanding”

Bloom’s Taxonomy http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ is “a framework for categorizing educational goals”. When I was beginning education grad student, I thought the goal of every lesson was for learners to “understand” stuff. “You know, I don’t know, students will understand that the civil war was really important, for, you know, everyone in the south after it was over.” That’s some pretty content-free stuff right there, which is pretty much how my first teaching attempts went. Continue reading

Motivation: It’s a continuum, not a dichotomy

I remember happily nodding along with the platitudes about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations during grad school. The information fit within my ideals about learning for learning’s sake. Intrinsic motivation– the motivation to learn and perform for a feeling of internal satisfaction– was in my mind the golden standard. Rewarding students, a form of extrinsic motivation, was detrimental to the health of the learner, would sap their love of learning, and would create generations of lab rat-like students performing their tasks for a stipend of sugar-laden M&Ms.

After all these years, my understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is quite different, Continue reading

Practice: Early and Often

As I work with my young adult students, I find that I am not offering profound insights into calculus or chemical engineering, I am coaching them on skills and ideas that we continue to practice as adults. Often I’m merely retelling students my own insights in coping with problematic situations, and reminding myself again to improve myself. Here are my top 5 skills that every adult, young or old needs to practice, early and often, to be more productive, and happier.

Recognize Your Passions and Strengths Continue reading

7 Steps to Designing or Modifying Objective-Based Activities!!

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to get to present at the NASAGA conference in Baltimore. I’ve been involved with NASAGA since 2004 when I got introduced to this wonderful group of trainers, teachers, and designers. I’d really suggest attending next year’s conference in Seattle if you are wanting an infusion of creativity and inspiration.

This presentation came from seeing the disconnect between activities, learning objectives and evaluation in much of the training that I see. I want to see better matches between what we are teaching and how we are evaluating learner’s performance.

While these are presented as 7 discrete steps, it’s likely that a designer would need to revisit earlier stages to make adjustments as needed.

Determine the Goal

This is the big picture goal. Examples include: Students will develop their reading skills or The team will build stronger relationships. These fall within a continuum that could be goals for 6 or 60 year olds.

Identify Required Prior Knowledge/Analyze the Learners

First the designer must determine where on that continuum the learner lies. Letter Name recognition or college-level comprehension? Are these sales associates just beginning their careers, or are these executives selling at the enterprise level? There are tons of cultural, cognitive, language, developmental factors that you need to be aware of as you design effective learning activities. So who is our audience? And what do they know?

identify Realistic Objectives for the Length of Session and Audience

This is where the designer decides what specific things our participants will be learning or doing. Objectives are performance based and verb-oriented. Some examples of objectives are:

  • Recall and state the 50 state capitals of the USA, or recall and state the features of a Ford 150 pick up truck
  • Compare and contrast the features of two competing products
  • Use proper placement and form while running
  • Create a personal goal statement
  • Improve confidence in ability to perform

Choose Performance Benchmarks

How do we “grade” our learners? Too often I see scores of multiple choice being the only way we measure learning, when in actuality we really want to know that they can perform tasks in the workplace, or that they are building foundational skills. We do need numbers, or qualitative rubrics, or rated rubrics. I’m enough of a pragmatist to know that we need reportable outcomes to funders– whether they’re our state governments, or donor or our managers. Here are some ways that we can describe performance benchmarks:

  • Correctly spell 8 out of 10 words.
  • List at least 5 differences between 2 products
  • Match at customer attributes to the best available product
  • Run a mile in 10 minutes or less
  • Create one software routine that can correctly manage user input

Scale Story and Time to Create a Metaphor

The most effective training takes an authentic real-life performance task and scales to the “classroom” so that the class performance most closely relates to what the learner will need to do out in the world. The prime example of this kind of emulation is a simulation– Military video games, or NASAGA member Chuck Petranek’s drinking game. While a video game can give us amazing immersive graphics, it can be as simple as having a chip represent an alcoholic beverage. Sometimes metaphors can become belabored and unwieldy– and the focus becomes on replacing the relationships. We want to have stories that are simple and support the learning objectives– It certainly can be tempting to provide overly complex stories, but scaling back and focusing on the learning objectives helps focus on the important stuff, not building overly elaborate fancy worlds.

Develop Participant Activities

Activities can be individual, team, face to face, online, merged, games. We have whole arsenals available to us. We can do a better job of convincing our stakeholders to use a variety of activities when we can clearly connect them to learning outcomes.

Select Debrief Techniques

How many times have evaluation at the end of a course devolved into a certificate of completion for the student, and a survey for the instructor? That’s not enough .One of the ways that gamification can really be effective is providing a more compelling feedback loop– badges can be great motivators, and can track varying levels of mastery. Points boards can be used effectively (and carefully) to foster competition. BUT, this is only the beginning. If I had my druthers, we would see more integration on training and feedback into the workplace, or school setting. People often see training outside of their workplace performance, and really, it would be good to tie annual reviews/reflection all of the rest into our training.