It isn’t often that a TV programme inspires me to write a blog but I found myself watching ‘Gareth Malone’s Extraordinary School for Boys’ on BBC with an increasing mix of frustration and envy. If you haven’t seen this programme, it shows Gareth Malone, an engaging young musician and choirmaster who has had great success in inspiring young people to achieve success in the performing arts, attempting to improve the literacy of primary school boys by offering them a different type of school curriculum. He is clearly onto something: he recognises that many boys strugggle with traditional classroom based lessons and wants to offer them outdoor, energetic, competitive, high risk activity to enhance their motivation and engagement. He works with a class of boys, with the somewhat reluctant support of the headteacher, over a term and has permission to create his own learning environment and activity design.

That’s where my envy came from – what an amazing opportunity in this age of highly regulated education! I’m with him so far – then my frustration kicks in because as far as I’m concerned there is a blindingly obvious missing link in what he’s doing. And it’s a gap I recognise because I’ve seen it so often in learning and development in adult learning too. It is the gap between activity and learning purpose.

Let me give you some examples. The boys run competitive races and charge around in the local woods. They chop trees and have fights. They then take part in a formal debate, supposedly to improve their confidence at speaking aloud. Where is the connection between the outdoor activity and the debate? It’s not there. In another example, the boys are given swords, shields and freedom to act out a Roman battle. They have a wild and chaotic time. They are then taken into the classroom and asked to read and complete worksheets about Roman battles – presumably because their interest has been fired by their re-enacted battle. Do they read? Not really. Well, of course not. There is no connection between the need to read and the activity they’ve just taken part in.

So how could it be different? Let’s suppose we want to inspire the boys to speak and read and also allow them to be outdoors and re-enact a battle. So, let’s design it differently. Let’s make them need to read and speak, in order to achieve the the fun and thrill of the search and the battle. Here are some possibilities. They divide into two teams. Each team needs to read out written clues that will lead them round a pre-defined trail in the woods. They need to pass the instructions between sub-groups (in secret, so the enemy doesn’t hear them) so they need to set up a communication system. To do that they need to read the map to find the components and instructions to build and operate a field telephone. They need to crack a code to transmit secret messages. The written clues lead to their stash of weapons and the ‘battle plan’. To win the battle they have to follow the general’s orders – which arrive in writing, of course…..

I hope by now you see where I’m going. Good learning design, whether in a school for boys or a corporate environment, has to have a clear and strong connection between learning purpose, desired outcomes, learning process and learning activity.

At RSVP Design we are experts in how to link learning purpose and learning design. We create powerful learning environments in which the connections are clear and obvious. We may not be working with school children but we could certainly point Gareth Malone in the right direction!

If you are interested in creating rich, powerful , purposeful learning environments for your adult learners, let us know and we’ll send you an invitation to our Creating REALS workshop, specifically designed for L+D professionals who want to improve their learning design skills. We look forward to inspiring you!

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Here is a fascinating presentation on an alternative way to teach! It certainly support the move from teaching to facilitating!

Click here

effective lifelong learning, learner engagement, Learning Design, Learning Mindset, learning styles, learning tools, motivation, teaching Hide

In a press release to promote their upcoming Content and Collaboration Summit 2010 (London, UK, September 15-16) Gartner Research forecast 10 key changes in the nature of work through to 2020:  “Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, ’swarming’ and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

We agree with the predictions, and see it as a continuation of change we are already seeing in organisations; and with it will come some major challenges for L&D/OD departments. Here are the ten key changes Gartner forecast, and where we think L&D professionals should be considering a response.

1. De-routinization of Work – the obvious response here is the de-routinization and individual personalisation of training. We look forward to when “Here is the list of available training courses” is accepted as an outdated and wasteful use of trainer and delegate time & resources. I suspect the public sector in the UK has some way to go on this …
2. Work Swarms – workers need more insight into how they might work effectively with others who think differently or have different problem-solving approaches etc. Tools like HBDI or Effective Life-long Learning Inventory will be useful in being able to quickly work effectively in ’swarms’ of people you don’t know well.
3. Weak Links – formal and informal networking will become an even more important skill in the future, and not just for salespeople! Consider how and where social and business networking sites can and should be used during worktime. Is time spent networking on Facebook helping to build weak links, or just chatting with friends? Will updating my blog be considered as vanity or essential to developing these weak links?
4. Working With the Collective – Perhaps ‘influencing’ will become the most desirable skill of any business leader as we move to a position where ‘the collective’ replaces any internal hierarchy? This suggests more  prefered ‘right-side’ thinking style in the HBDI model than the traditonal ‘left-side’ found in many management positions today.
5. Work Sketch-Ups – ‘Designing-in-flight’ or ‘managing in ambiguity’ requires a very different set of skills and behaviours than that typically suggested by teaching through a ‘case-study’ method. How will our Business Schools and academics respond? Will we move to more activity-based learning facilitation than ‘teaching’?
6. Spontaneous Work – This suggests creating the type of corporate culture where this is not only desired but encouraged. How do you build this culture? Contrast this with today where most ‘leaders’ set the work agenda – how do you lead/manage people who develop their own work activities and priorities?
7. Simulation and Experimentation – of course we believe that activity-based learning provides the ideal ’synthetic’ environment to experiment and simulate behaviours. That’s why we create tools to help organisations build their learning environments!
8. Pattern Sensitivity – See Ann’s forthcoming book:  Pattern Making,  Pattern Breaking
9. Hyperconnected – in a hyperconnected world there is probably no time for formal contracts and agreements. Does this suggest an increase in the importance of ‘Trust’ and a requirement to better understand how to build and maintain it? Is it hopefully the end of long-winded tender processes?
10. My Place – how do we deliver training at ‘My Place’  (the workplace may be virtual, may physically be at home, or indeed may change on a daily basis)? Will it be more ‘edutainment apps’, delivered outside of the normal working hours, paid for by discerning individuals (who want to build their learning power) out of their own pocket (or personal learning account)?

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