THE RELUCTANT TRAINER
B Y N A N C Y
H I L D E B R A N D T
Silicon Valley Chapter
I walked into the training room at 3:00 to deliver my 15-minute segment on Internet security and found these conditions:
- The day of training was purely PowerPoint slides, with the occasional switch to a computer display.
- The handout was a copy of the PowerPoint slides.
- The room was dark and 80 degrees with no air circulating. Opening the doors led to noise from outside.
- Some participants had just come from overseas.
In short, this training situation had all the warning signs of imminent Death by PowerPoint. I'd observed a full day of the same workshop with air conditioning, but I'd still lost my concentration by 2:00 in the afternoon. How much presentation in a dark room can a body tolerate?
Quite a bit, apparently. One famous high-tech company here in Silicon Valley holds a boot camp in Texas that consists of eight solid weeks of PowerPoint training for its technical people. Immediately after training each day, the participants head straight for the bar, then go back to the hotel room to knock off some homework. So far no deaths have been reported.
In the belief that training should not be fatal, I convened with a couple of colleagues from other companies to brainstorm alternatives to Death by PowerPoint.
Don't buy into the argument that PowerPoint training is done because PowerPoint slides are the easiest and fastest to prepare. One colleague, who worked at one of the leading database companies, redesigned a consulting skills course to include many role-playing exercises and case studies. PowerPoint slides were used only to present objectives, and posters around the room were used as "anchors," so the course principles would be visible at all times. The Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and trainers were delighted to find that it took much less time to prepare these course materials than a day of PowerPoint slides. Because the participants had more fun, those doing the training had more fun also.
Even if role-playing activities aren't appropriate for the particular type of technical training you do, there are many other activities that still take less time to prepare than PowerPoint slides. What types of activities can be done in technical training? Here are some ideas.
| Think workshop | Get away from presentations and focus on learning experiences. Analyze a case study, troubleshoot a problem, make the steps for a procedure a discovery process. Even new hires bring many skills into the room. |
| Interact with or without computers | Perhaps for your type of training, the best workshop would call for a computer for every participant, but suppose you don't have that luxury. There are still many interactive ways that you can run the session. |
| Student driver | If you have one computer set up with a projector, then instead of the trainer demonstrating a procedure, get a participant to volunteer to be the "driver." When he or she needs help, ask the group what they might do at that point. When the group is participating in the demonstration, it will be paced more at the group's learning speed, not at the speed that the trainer can type and talk. |
| Group troubleshooting | Have groups troubleshoot a problem and come up with hypotheses, then get the student driver to try out the solutions on the computer. Throw participant questions back to the group. Consider yourself a trainer of last resort. |
| Group projects | If you can have a room with a few computers that small groups can share, you can have them accomplish a procedure or solve a problem, with the trainer floating as a resource person. If one group finishes early, they can start floating also -- they will learn from the questions they can't answer. |
| Offer variety | If the problem is complex, have small groups attack it first. Then have each group write each possible solution on a Post-it note or piece of paper and post them on a wall. The entire group can discuss how to organize and rank them. (I've heard this referred to as the "dump and clump" method.) If it is feasible to come up with multiple problems or case studies to illustrate a single point, have each separate group present both the problem and the solution to the entire group. |
| Self-reliance through documentation | Shift the focus from presenting information to making participants rely on existing documentation. Hand out manuals, or pages printed from online help if they cannot access a computer. (Participants tend to want printouts of the documentation even when it is online.) Then give individuals or small groups exercises that require them to look up information. When answers to questions are in the documentation, make the group find the answer there. This ensures that participants will know how to use the existing documentation on the job. SMEs are happy because they can put their efforts into the documentation, not both documentation and training materials. |
| Small-group power | Consider the benefits of assigning tasks to small groups. In a large group, most individuals are afraid of giving a wrong answer, asking a stupid question, taking up the group's time. Small groups will help each other reason through ideas, make guesses, be emboldened to ask questions. Shy persons feel involved rather than alienated. In a training class whose participants will continue to interact in the course of their work, learning what others' specialties are during the course of group activities, and learning which people they can rely on for information, can prove to be a powerful benefit. |
| Keep them dancing | Look for ways to change the groups throughout the day. Pass out numbers, then reform groups by sequential number block, then by even/odd numbers, and so on. (Ask the group to help you figure out the next clever number grouping.) Or reorganize groups related to departments within the company (same department, different department). A side benefit is that it forces people to stand up and move around as they form new groups; don't underestimate the power of keeping people awake. |
| PowerPoint's strengths | You must present some information in your training, and even while an activity is in progress it is helpful to have the instructions displayed on a screen. In this case, the PowerPoint slide is used as a tool, not a crutch, and the room is not kept dark during the entire day. |
Even if you cannot convince trainers to break away from a mostly PowerPoint presentation, there are still ways to build in more trainer-participant interaction.
| Resist the lure of technology | Don't build in technological diversions, such as PowerPoint transitions, to entertain the audience. Instead, after each slide, ask yourself, "Is there a question I could ask, a problem or activity I could present that would make the group think more about this information?" Audiences, particularly technical ones, are entertained when they have to think. |
| Ask frequent review questions | Ask implication questions. Build in frequent short quizzes. Present case studies based on the material you've just presented and have small groups discuss them, then compare notes with the other groups. |
| Guessing, a powerful tool | Jumble the order of steps to a procedure and have small groups guess the proper order before it is presented. This works best when the there are seven or fewer steps. If you have time to print out the steps on a piece of paper and cut them into strips, you can pass them out to individuals and then have them line up to show the order of the steps. |
| Movement enhances learning and memory | For a lesson on encryption and digital signatures, I made pairs of color-matched keys to pass out to participants to demonstrate whose public and whose private keys were used to scramble and unscramble the information. By practicing with their own key pairs, participants can conceptualize and remember this complex topic much more easily. It was as easy to cut out keys from paper as it was to design a graphic on a PowerPoint slide. |
The compromise for group involvement is that you have less time to cover new material. This is usually a good thing, as it forces you to prioritize information; your groups probably weren't retaining the information in all those slides anyway. The side benefit is that you will have fewer slides to prepare.
Once you convince trainers and Subject Matter Experts that preparation time for an interactive presentation is usually less, there is still one large hurdle to negotiate. In a purely PowerPoint presentation, the audience may be dead, but the speaker has retained total control.
An interactive presentation may lead to questions that cannot be answered. It may require more group control and time management skills. The discussion may spin off in unexpected directions. This may disconcert the trainer. This may, in fact, terrify the trainer. It may require some train-the-trainer efforts to accomplish the transition. But the results will be well worth the expedition into new territory. Your trainers will start to observe the benefits of allowing the participants to, well, participate, both in terms of enjoyment during the class and mastery of material when the class is over.
There is one more side benefit to charting out more interactivity in the classroom: the leap to online training becomes much shorter. This is the subject of future columns. For an overview of the direction in which we're heading, see my first column.
Fall 1999
Volume 2, # 4