"When Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, sat down with students in a Philadelphia private school to talk about their personal learning preferences, no one delivered the same answer. One student liked research papers, preferring a clear template and an assignment with a defined start and finish. Another loved multimedia projects, relishing the opportunity to think about something in many different ways. Another said their mind worked like the video games they liked to play.

Now imagine, Dede said in an interview at EDUCAUSE 2007 in Seattle, if those three students walked into your classroom. And they came with a group of peers whose learning preferences weren’t even on that same menu.

“If I were designing a learning environment for those students], it would really have to be like an ecology,” Dede said. “It would have to have a lot of different niches in it because from one day to the next, any one particular student may want a different kind of niche. And different types of students might want different kinds of niches…"

The entry is geared towards instructional designers creating e-learning, but applicable to in-person delivery as well.

Check it out: Build Better E-Learning Courses By Getting Rid of Some of the Content

Training is about creating… CHANGE.

CHANGE… in the way people do things.

CHANGE… in what people know.

CHANGE… in the results people get.

One way to conduct an effective "instructional interview" (similar to a reference interview) is to use a technique called IWWMW that I'm borrowing from the business industry.

IWWMW stands for "In what ways might we" which is the core of the technique.

The process uses these 3 questions or statements:

Question - Why do we want to ….?
Answer – So that….
Redefinition – In what ways might we ….?

You would run through these 3 questions until you were satisfied that you had identified the crux of the problem that you will be addressing.

So, let's say you're talking to your client (the person who wants you to do a workshop). In this case they're a professor. What they ask you is to teach their students a particular database - let's say Pubmed.

Your job is to ask "Why do you want your students to learn Pubmed?"
Perhaps they respond, "So that my students learn to use peer-reviewed articles in their research."
Next you ask yourself if that answer really satisfies you (and them)? Is that the real problem that you will be "solving" in your workshop: "In what ways might students learn to use peer-reviewed articles in their research?"
Or do you want to go deeper?

Try another round:
"Why do you want your students to use peer-reviewed articles in their research?"
They respond, "So that...."
Does that satisfy you? If not, try for another round.

What might happen is that during this process both you and your client realize that you need to overhaul the whole assignment, or maybe even the syllabus. Maybe you need to have a pre or post-workshop assignment to address your bigger "problem." In other words, this discussion could open up enormous opportunities for you and your client to truly tackle some big stuff. And in the least, it can help you really focus on what's essential in the workshop.

Give it a try the next time you conduct a needs assessment!

Continue process until you’re satisfied you’ve identified the real problem.

We offer our pilot workshop to library supervisors who want their student workers and new staff to learn the content we teach in the workshop. They require that their workers attend. We teach the workshop as it is designed, but at the end we turn the group into a focus group. We review each section of the workshop, stop, and facilitate a discussion:
What are some things you did not know about until you took this part of the workshop?
What did you like about this part of the workshop?
Did anything about this part of the workshop bother you?
How could this part be improved?
Other comments?

Amazing the kind of useful, thoughtful feedback we have gotten.

We've also done this with "real" workshops and "real" users where we've asked participants in a workshop to stay afterwards (and we pay them!) and conduct the same kind of focus group discussion then.

It's pretty easy to throw this kind of evaluation together but yet you'll get tons of value out of it. Give it a try!

Brainstorming Content
- Group brings ideas and their points of view
- Make this a group activity
- Great way to cover everything. I missed a lot on my own
- Not to analyze, just say it
- I like brainstorming in a circle (taking turns). Seems to prompt responses
- Work with co-workers to discuss. Can this be done with faculty? [Answer: Yes, if they know the content fairly well.]
- Be open to all ideas! Facilitate process.

Filtering Content
- Don’t overpack the session with information
- Look at what I plan to present and divide by need-to-know and nice-to-know
- Importance of limiting/focusing on goal -what I can deliver.
- Focus on need-to-know because nice-to-know will probably fall by the wayside
- Get to what’s important
- Be strict. More B’s (nice-to-knows) than A’s (need-to-knows)
- Breaking topics into different categories
- Focus on need-to-know, not nice-to-know
- Be ruthless with A’s and B’s
- Classify and eliminate
- Space facilitated discussion (from the brainstorming) to avoid anger over Boolean cut (as an example)

Task Analysis
- Delineating steps focuses us to ask whether the students have the necessary background knowledge
- Look at my existing exercises and break down tasks more; have a student do them beforehand to test
- It’s hard to figure out what your actual goal is
- Painful process to figure out what the learner has to do to be successful
- Change level of task based on what learner already knows
- Have realistic expectations, actions, and steps
- Try to imagine 3 modules per 50 minute class

Others
- Emphasis on moving from lecture to users teaching each other
- Design content for pre-class and post-class handouts/worksheets/web pages
- Content presentation can be done by students
- Give handouts with gaps. Reveal answers later (mystery!).
- Learners can present content
- Renewed enthusiasm for integrating information competency into curriculum
- Awareness of the need to discuss this more within the system as a whole and the need to advocate for a change in the model system-wide

Obviously there are many steps we didn't cover in a half-day session. I focused on some of the most difficult steps which often can have the biggest impact on the final library workshop design.

Here's a summary snippet taken from the article:

Freshman Teaching Tips
Here are a few excellent tips garnered from Pasqualoni and Galloway:

* Chunk lessons into a beginning, middle and ending
* Use mixed media and approaches to keep interest (e.g., instructor lecture, video clips & student interaction)
* Experiment and try new techniques (e.g., "Radical Syllabus" exercise )
* Ask students "what interests you?"
* Distribute helpful handouts
* Be "Presentation-Proofed" by carrying material in several formats
* Plan a “Library Lock-In” event and create excitement

To answer this question, ask yourself who you are being in a certain situation. Are you a teacher, are you a lecturer, or are you an orientation leader?

The last two roles – lecturer and orientation leader – probably give the learner more responsibility to handle the content on their own. But the first role – teacher – places you with a greater responsibility to ensure that learning is taking place.

When I give my train the library teacher workshops to other librarians, this topic usually comes up after the design teams have brainstormed pages and pages of content and are now attempting to figure out what content is really crucial and what is less so. Inevitably, someone in the groups will say, "Well, we're just going to mention that item, we're not really going to teach it."

Now remember – we’re not designing orientations and we’re not designing lectures – we’re designing workshops. So, I have a pretty strong reaction to this. What I remind folks is that “mentioning” content comes at a cost to the learner. Learners only have so much cognitive ability to absorb and make sense of your content. In fact, when it comes to short term memory, the rule of thumb is that a person can only take in about 5 to 9 pieces of information before their capacity to take in information is reached. At that point the learner has to do something with that knowledge – apply it, synthesize it, process it – in order for it move into long term memory. So every time you mention something (“Oh, and you can order this through Interlibrary Loan. That’s a service where you… blah blah blah”) you’re tipping the learner towards or over the 5 to 9 mark. The problem is that when you do get to something that you actually want them to learn, you’ve used up your ration, and have to move directly into the “doing something” part of your lesson plan instead of covering more content/teaching points. But chances are, you wouldn't have designed this fast detour into "doing something" and so your handouts and exercises wouldn't work. If you're not fast on your feet, guess what - it probably means you’ve just messed up your essential need-to-know content with a bunch of "nice to know," yet less essential information. Yikes!

There’s a fabulous book out there called Telling Ain’t Training. This should be essential reading for all of us librarian enamored with our content and information. The single most important thing we can probably do is to lose our infatuation with sharing EVERYTHING that should be known and focus solely on the most essential items that must be known.

Thought I'd share this with you all:

Do's
> Identify a client with enough clout to strongly recommend or assign learners to your workshop
> Keep in communication with that client throughout the design process
> Conduct a thorough needs assessment
> Take responsibility for your learners meeting your objectives
> Keep content to a minimum and focus on application and feedback

Don'ts
> Drown your learners in content
> Blow off the needs assessment
> Think if you say something that your learners have learned something. (Saying does not equal teaching.)
> Design an entire workshop by yourself - stretch yourself by collaborating with others.
> Assume just because you designed the workshop that you have to teach it. There may be others who might be better suited to deliver your workshop.
> Assume just because you're good in front of the classroom that you're a good instructional designer. Sometimes being a good performer can get in the way of a good workshop design!

Hope this list helps!

A heads-up to you all is that for the Seattle workshop I redid the worksheets.

For those of you who haven't gone through one of my workshops, the worksheets can be used as a guide when designing your own workshops. They can be used with the book, or on their own. The link for the worksheets are near the top of this page.

For those of you who have taken my workshop prior to the Seattle one, the main changes are the addition of a checklist after each step that I pulled from theCreating the One-Shot Library Workshop book. I also added in much more detailed information in the evaluation step since I don't usually cover that enough during the workshop.

Clearly, writing great questions is a challenge. Over the years in our “Unravel the Library” workshops at the U of MN-Twin Cities we try each semester to improve our questions. I talk about this quite a bit in the Creating the One-Shot Library Workshop book, but here, wanted to point out a resource that I recommend you track down if you're interested in writing better quiz questions:

Assessment in College Library Instruction Programs, is part of ACRL’s CLIP Note series, #32, and is written by Lawrie H. Merz and Beth L. Mark ACRL

There are lots of great examples there that can help keep us from reinventing the wheel.. again.

[Also, related to this topic is another entry in this blog about the relational model of design that links assessment to goals and activities.]

First, decide to which of these three domains your learning content belongs:

1. Facts and Information

A fact is a simple bit of knowledge or information. It is usually in the form of a statement that specifies a relationship between two or more objects, actions, or events:

- AND is a Boolean operator.
- An article index is where you can look to find articles on your topic.

Facts are mostly related to other facts and other types of knowledge.

2. Concepts

A concept is a set of objects, events, actions, characteristics, or ideas that share critical attributes and belong to a specific class that is identified by a common label.

- Controlled Vocabulary
- Citation Styles

For every concept, you should be able to provide multiple examples. (If you cannot, you are probably dealing with a fact.)

3. Procedures and Processes

A procedure is a step-by-step skill that is performed essentially the same way each time.

- Finding a book with a known title
- Identifying who is citing a seminal article in your field

A process is a sequential flow of events.
- Responding to a digital reference question
- Designing workshop handouts

What kind of game might you design for each type of learning content?

1. Information and Facts

- CHOICES with multiple choice questions
- TIC TAC with questions resulted to different subtopics
- HANGMAN (multiple question) with fact recall questions
- CATEGORIZE (True or False) with statements to be classified as true or false

2. Concepts

- CATEGORIZE (categories) with different related concept labels and examples to be classified.
- HANGMAN (single question) that requires recall of examples
- TIC TAC with questions classified according to different concepts.
- CHOICES with questions related to critical and irrelevant features of a concept.

3. Procedures and Processes

- SEQUENCE for arranging steps, stages, or phases in the right order.
- CATEGORIZES (categories) to classify items (inputs, activities, standards, outputs) according to the step (or stage or phase) associated with them.
- HANGMAN (single question) for recalling items associated with different steps (or stages or phases)
- TIC TAC with questions related to different steps (or stages or phases)

Performance-Based Focus
1. Base the content on the learners’ job tasks.
2. Break tasks down into step-by-step “how to” instructions.
3. Minimize “nice-to-know” information.
4. Target content to the experience level of the learners.
5. Design exercises that simulate the job tasks.
6. Design activities that will help learners transfer the skills learned to their job.
7. Design course materials to be job aids.
8. Build principles of adult learning into the course.
9. Structure the course content according to how the job is performed.
10. Spend about 1/3 of the course time on the presentation of content.
11. Allow about 2/3 of the course time for application (i.e. practice) and feedback.
12. Validate the course with a representative sample of the learner population.

Go to the pdf version here.

Middleton is actually talking about the title of a program he offers, and not a one-shot workshop - but the idea is the same. His key advice is to make sure your title is benefit-oriented, that it addresses the problem and that it gives your learners what they want. Read the whole entry on "The More Clients Blog."

The idea is to use a great title and description to attract learners to your workshops that wouldn't ordinarily come. Give it a try and see if it makes a difference!

Regardless of who designs and delivers the instruction session – the expert or a generalist instructional staff - the two tools that can make the most difference are the task analysis (step 6) and the articulation of teaching points (step 7). These tools help the expert/designer to translate a task into its discrete parts and to articulate a perfectly understandable sentence or couple of sentence that communicates a key point. It can mean the difference between a confusing workshop and a clear one.

I go into these steps in 2 separate chapters, but found a very readable article by a school librarian about her discovery and use of a task analysis that I think is worth tracking down. Here’s the citation:

Rankin, Virginia, “Task analysis or, relief for the major discomforts of research assignments.” School Library Journal, Nov92, Vol. 38, Issue 11

Here’s a paragraph from her conclusion to entice you to track this article down:

Task analysis can be helpful to many of us as we try to make our vision of information literacy more concrete. Other things that now seem crucial to me-like the idea of slowing down, and stopping, or going into reverse to make sure one comprehends information-had been absent from my instruction. I now feel I am in a better position to systematically help my students to be better engagers/ interrogators/ interpreters/ processors of information.

Take a look!