The Reluctant Trainer: The Reluctant Student

While I have often played the role of the reluctant trainer — caught in a situation in which I felt there was a better alternative to training — I recently found myself in the role of reluctant student.

I was attending a three-day training course on technical fundamentals of a suite of products from a particular software company. There were about a dozen people in the course from several different companies. They had all recently purchased some subset of products available in the suite, and it was clear that the representatives of each company had their own agenda. One pushy student in particular interrupted the instructor every few minutes to ask questions that would give her what she needed to know to master her own situation.

It’s not surprising that a student would have such a goal, and you would certainly call her interested and motivated. The instructor tried hard to answer all her questions. But her questions were not my questions, and the rest of us kept getting diverted by her interests. After the first few hours I had nearly tuned out.

Like a control variable in an interesting experiment, the third day we had a different instructor, whose teaching style was quite different. When the aggressive student interrupted with questions, he would tell her to wait and see if her question was answered in his presentation, or he would give her the name of another course in which the answer was revealed. This instructor’s style was meeting my needs, but not those of the aggressive student. Imagine my amazement when she ran up to him at the first break to ask if he did consulting work! With his examples and tips during the lecture, he demonstrated that he had extensive knowledge of how to put the product to work.

The Reluctant Student

We often pay attention to the students who act bored, angry, even hostile. However, the quiet students get an equal vote on feedback sheets, and sometimes it can be a shock to find a stack of negative reviews when you thought a class was going very successfully. There can be more reluctant students than meet the eye.

When I use the term “reluctant student,” I mean someone who does not want to be taking the class. Part of your job as a reluctant trainer is to find ways to minimize the number of reluctant students.

Students may be reluctant for many reasons:

• Their manager made them come.
  
  
• They feel that the technical information in the course is beneath them—or that it should be beneath them.
  
  
• They are afraid someone will notice that the technical information in the course is too challenging.
  
  
• The course is not what they thought they signed up for.
  
  
• They don’t like the class dynamic — someone is controlling the class, and it isn’t the teacher.
  
  
• Their learning style does not suit the teaching style.
  
  
• Something is going on in their personal lives that has nothing to do with the course.

Material-centric Courses

I’m going to propose arbitrarily that the first distinction to make in deciding how to address reluctant learners is to decide whether your class is material-centric or learner-centric. Suppose you are offering safety training, or a course leading to certification in some area. You are going to teach some material, the students are going to demonstrate mastery of that material, and their goal for being there is to get that piece of paper. The course is material-centric.

In a material-centric course, there are various ways you can minimize reluctance, but you can’t monkey with the material. Here are some of the things you can change:

• Make sure that the course prerequisites are enforced. Since success is primarily determined by demonstrating knowledge to a criterion level, you are in big trouble when you must teach material at one level and your students are at another level.
  
  
• Take some time to find out why the students are attending the course. This has two benefits. First, you cannot change the course content, but you may be able to add examples and fine-tune the course in other ways to make it more meaningful to your group. Second, some reluctant students feel better simply by being able to make it known that they are reluctant. Once it’s out on the table, their attitude may change.
  
  
• Make sure your class understands that your goal is material-centric, then make it clear that you will enforce it. Answer questions only when they provide further understanding of the topics to be tested. The students will respect you for keeping the class on track.
  
  
• Material-centric does not mean teacher-centric! There are any number of ways you can shift the emphasis from teaching to learning and keep the class interesting. See an earlier column for suggestions. Use a variety of techniques to meet different learning styles.

Material-centric courses can be easier, because you have fewer degrees of freedom.

Learner-centric Courses

Suppose you are in the situation of trainer Daniel Honniball (biscette@att.net), who went to Denver to do on-site training on how to install his company’s software product. When he started the class, he discovered that not a single person in the room knew anything about UNIX, the platform required for the software. He immediately threw out his syllabus and started to teach a UNIX course, focusing on the commands the students were going to need to install the product. Later in the day, he moved into the actual installation procedures, with the objective of helping the students become proficient with a basic installation and familiar with the product administrator’s guide. This way they would know where to look for more advanced information when the course was finished.

The bad news was that Daniel’s entire group was badly mismatched for the course he came prepared to teach. The good news was that he had a homogenous group, so when he changed his syllabus on the spur-of-the-moment, it met everyone’s needs.

In a learner-centric course, the objective is to help the learners meet their goals, and you adjust everything else accordingly. Ideally, you are still looking for as homogeneous a group as possible, even though you might not have the same strict prerequisites that you would have for a certification course. In reality, you often get a mix of people in the class—students who ignored the prerequisites, students sent by companies who want them to extract advanced consulting services out of a basic course, students whose manager did not make clear to them why they were told to attend.

Here are some ways to minimize student reluctance in a learner-centric course.

• Try to find out in advance the goals of the students who will be attending the course. Daniel suggests contacting the person who is putting the course together, and, if possible, contacting the students themselves. Being flexible is great, but being prepared is even better.
  
  
• At the beginning of the course, spend more time finding out what students expect to get out of the course and what background knowledge they have.
  
  
• If you find that the course as planned will not suit the majority, but your group is not homogeneous, it may be useful to explicitly negotiate the material that you will cover. (Make sure the quiet students are also in agreement.) Once you have agreed to the new plan, treat it as a material-centric course and follow the tips in the preceding section.
  
  
• Decide whether you want to please some of the students most of the time, or most of the students some of the time. And for the students you can’t please at all, don’t take it personally. Some things are out of your control.

Of course it helps if your coursework has built-in flexibility. Daniel has a great rule-of-thumb. When you design a course, start with the terminal objective and end by designing the labs. When you actually teach the course, start with the labs. By building a course around labs, and having a number of labs to choose from, you know that you will involve students and allow them to interact with the product in a more personal way.

Reluctant Student, Reluctant Trainer, Reluctant Student

I read a fascinating psychology study, so many years ago that I cannot identify the source now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The teacher was told to teach a course on a certain topic to two different classes. What the teacher didn’t know was that the students were “in” on the experiment. In one class, students did not make eye contact with the teacher; they looked bored; they did everything they could to convince the teacher they were reluctant students. The teacher stopped attempts at humor, started to mumble, became tense. In a second class, students engaged with the teacher — they smiled, made eye contact, looked interested. The teacher became relaxed and animated, cracked jokes.

For a class full of reluctant students, it’s a vicious cycle, with an outcome nobody wants — a course that could have been much better if everyone had approached it with a positive attitude. If you have a particularly difficult class, or even if you have a class that is temporarily hypoglycemic, make extra efforts to keep yourself from damping down. Sometimes, stopping to get more input and making a midcourse correction is helpful in breaking this cycle. Sometimes, finding ways to get the quieter students more involved can also break the perception that nobody is cooperating.

Carry On, Reluctant Trainers!

This will be my last column in the Reluctant Trainer series. A reluctant trainer is someone who focuses on the best way to improve performance and considers instructor-led training only one of a number of alternatives. I continue to believe that a reluctant trainer is the best type of trainer. However, I have become wedged into the position of reluctant writer. Training is no longer in my job description, so it is getting harder to provide relevant examples and stay on top of the technology for e-Learning, which is evolving rapidly. If you are a trainer (and a member of the Society for Technical Communication) and would like to carry on with a training column of your own, please contact the Hyperviews:Online editor.