Last week I had an opportunity to co-facilitate a webinar for the Early Childhood Investigations webinar series. The focus was on effective presentation design.
Ensuring Transfer
One of the key points I made, late in the webinar, was how to increase the likelihood that your learners will transfer what they learn from your presentation into their own workflow when they return home. A key piece of this transfer is finding a way to engage your learners’ supervisors. (learn even more about supervisor support here)
What are we, as presenters, to do when we don’t have access to the learners’ supervisors?
There are several things we can do.
What Can We Control?
1. Effective Presentation Design
First, we can make sure our own presentations are designed with strategies intended to help engage our learners and make sure they’re paying attention. Those strategies should also include things like offering job aids or activities designed to help sear our content into the minds of our learners. If they’re not paying attention and if they don’t remember what we’ve presented, it will be very difficult for our learners to apply anything at a later time.
2. Resources, Checklists, Job-aids
Second, we can offer resources or checklists that our learners can bring home and give to their supervisors in order to set goals and/or help give targeted feedback to our learners.
At the end of the webinar, I shared this effective presentation design checklist with the audience – it can be used to allow presenters to evaluate their own presentations. It can also be used to help supervisors or peers or colleagues to focus on the kinds of things they should be looking for in presentation design and to target their feedback.
When we’re designing presentations with content that we hope our learners will put into action, we can’t forget about job aids and supervisor support.
What kinds of things are you doing to help your learners transfer your content when they return to their workplace? Are you ensuring effective presentation design?
