Did Malcolm Knowles Have It Wrong?
Every once in a while, I’ll look at a post-training evaluation form and see glowing praise for a PowerPoint-based lecture. Lecture receives a 5 out of 5 on evaluation forms?!
With feedback like that, I sometimes wonder if Malcolm Knowles knew what he was talking about. Is the effort that goes into interactive, engaging sessions really worthwhile?
I had a 3-minute interaction with a co-worker that re-affirmed for me that Malcolm Knowles, John Dewey, Jane Vella and the rest of the adult/experiential/dialogue education crowd indeed knew a thing or two about effective educational experiences.
As we were finishing our call, she mentioned that her staff was wondering when I would be returning to facilitate another workshop. The comment surprised me a bit. The last time I was in India I had designed the session but it was mostly facilitated by my Indian colleagues in Hindi. I understood little of the conversations that took place.
“Yeah, well, they want you to come back. They still remember the towel activity. It transcended language.”
Teambuilding Session Request
Several months ago, I had been asked to help put together a teambuilding session for a team in India that was transitioning from a workplace culture that valued individual efforts to our workplace culture which required a substantial degree of teamwork.
We didn’t want to just talk about teamwork but we weren’t going to take everyone out to a ropes course, either.
I worked with my India-based colleagues to design a half-day workshop as a kick-off to a series of monthly sessions we would offer to this new team.
We began with an activity that required smuggling a few towels out of my hotel (the aforementioned “towel activity”). The team had an hour-long conversation about our mission, vision and core values. To wrap up, we gave each team member a small stick. We asked them to break it in half. Then we asked them to break the two halves in half.
Holding the four quarters of the stick in one hand, the team members could no longer break the sticks. Four small pieces together were much stronger, less breakable than one individual stick.
It was flattering that they wanted me back, but I asked my co-worker for specific examples of anything that’s changed since this workshop.
“Brian, they communicate now. They cover for each other. In the past, if someone was working with a family in the hospital, I wouldn’t know about it for hours… if I ever found out. Now, if someone is working with a family, someone else gives me a call and a third person sends me a text. They’re truly working as a team. And that’s very different. They put your session into practice. If it hadn’t been so interactive, I don’t think they’d have remembered. They still have their sticks!”
How To Introduce Malcolm Knowles’ Theory on Adult Education
This story should prove to you that Malcolm Knowles’ theory on adult education is incredibly relevant for trainers. In my opinion, no Train-the-Trainer class would be complete without mentioning Malcolm Knowles and his theory on how adults learn. Unless your audience is full of true training geeks, not many people are going to dote on the theory part.
They want to connect the theory to their jobs, how it’s going to help them better reach their audiences, how it can be applied in real life. And they want all of this to take effect tomorrow, whether or not they can regurgitate what Knowles had to say.
Before I ever dare introduce Knowles and his theory, I always ask my audience to take a walk down memory lane and think of their best learning experience. It’s my icebreaker, my way to anchor abstract theory into my learners’ experiences.
Then I ask a few volunteers to share their best experiences and I connect elements of these learning experiences with various aspects of Knowles’ theory.
It’s a question I’ve asked scores of times. I’m not sure when I last answered the question for myself. As I reflected on today’s post, I thought of my high school teacher Mr. Reddinger and my fourth grade teacher Mr. O’Laughlin and the college class when we had to go to the National Archives and take a look at actual Revolutionary War pension records.
But my best learning experience (perhaps “best” simply because it’s the most recent) might be those times when I’m at my desk, trying to figure out how to do an advanced operation on Excel or trying to figure out how to change the orientation of just one page in a 17-page Word document from portrait to landscape.
When I take a few minutes to Google my question, find an answer, test it out, realize I didn’t do it right the first time, go back and read the answer again, figure out what I was doing wrong, and when it all culminates in my having mastered a new skill, I feel like I can figure out how to do anything. I want to learn how to accomplish other new tricks and master other little-used-but-really-helpful features of these Microsoft applications.
As I reflected on my own favorite learning experience, I wonder why so many other learning experiences (yes, even ones that I’ve designed) – from new hire orientation to conference workshops to 1-on-1 coaching between a supervisor and her direct report – don’t allow the learners more autonomy to experiment, play, fail, try it a different way, succeed and maybe even master a skill?
