Designing Active Training Activities
5. Setting. How should you set up the physical environment for the design to succeed?
6. Ending. What remarks do you want to make and/or what discussion do you want the participants to have before proceeding to the next activity?
Once these decisions have been made, a design is complete. Let us illus-trate this process.
EXAMPLE: Assume that you are conducting a course on assertive behavior for a group of sixteen managers. You are using a large training room with four windows. Participants are seated around U-shaped tables, which occupy only half the room. It’s right after lunch. During the morning, you discussed and THE REMAINING
DETAILS
demonstrated the differences among nonassertive, aggressive, and assertive styles of coping with conflict. Your goal for the early afternoon is to teach how body language is a large part of style. You decide that the purpose of your first design is to introduce the topic of body language in a dramatic way and to help partic-ipants become aware how they now use body language during a power struggle.
The next decisions concern method and format. Looking over several pos-sibilities, you decide to use a game that involves every participant. This deci-sion allows for a fast-paced, active activity, which is desirable after lunch. With sixteen people to accommodate and with the need for practice time later in the afternoon in mind, you decide to use pairs as the most efficient format for the game.
With these tentative decisions in mind, you now need to find a game or, if necessary, invent a game that will achieve your purposes. Luckily, a colleague has told you about a nonverbal “persuasion” game that might suit your pur-poses. The only problem is that this game usually takes forty-five minutes and appears to you to be too threatening for your clientele. You decide to redesign the game, paying attention to such details as time allotment, buy-in, activity instructions, materials, physical setting, and ending. Your final design might resemble the one in Figure 7.3.
FIGURE 7.3. NONVERBAL PERSUASION
After greeting the participants who have just returned from lunch, say the following:
“I thought it would be a good idea to wake us up after lunch with a lively activity. It will help us to introduce the topic of body language and its effect on our style.”
No materials are needed for the activity, but the instructions are very important and the physical setting plays a role. With those factors in mind, do the following:
1. Ask participants to pair off with seat partners and to establish whose birthday falls earlier in the calendar year.
2. Give the person with the earlier birthday in each pair an index card with the following instructions: “Leave your seat and go somewhere else in the room (for example, look out a window, stand in the corner of the room, play with some object). Soon, your partner will come to fetch you and will want to bring you back to your seat. Resist him or her, saying or doing whatever you like. Don’t go back to your seat until you feel persuaded to do so.”
3. After these participants leave their seats, ask their partners to go and fetch them. Explain to them that they can approach the task in any way they like except for one condition: they may not talk (or write) during the entire time they are trying to get their partners back to their seats. (Allow the “resisters”
to overhear your instructions to the “persuaders.”)
FIGURE 7.3. continued
4. When all participants have eventually returned to their seats, ask the re-sisters to privately give feedback to their persuaders. Urge them to identify which kinds of nonverbal communication were effective and which were ineffective. (Effective nonverbal communication tends to include some of the following: good eye contact, decisiveness, firm but gentle physical movements, persistence, and calmness.)
5. Ask the resisters to brag about their partners’ effective nonverbal behaviors to the rest of the group.
6. Invite the partners to reverse roles and redo the exercise.
7. End the activity by stating that research indicates that the nonverbal aspects of communication (vocal, facial, and postural) influence the impact of our messages more (some even say 93 percent more) than does the verbal con-tent. Write on a flip chart: “It’s not what you say but how you say it.” Invite participants to react to the statement.
Many trainers wish they were more creative. However, creative designers are not a special breed; they work at being creative and use several tricks to help them do their best. Here are some of their tips.
One Design Can Accomplish Two Things at Once
Economy is the trademark of a good design, and with a little care, most de-signs can serve double duty. For example, you could brief participant observers about nonverbal aspects of communication to watch for while their peers are giving sales presentations. By watching how you change your facial, vocal, and postural communication during the briefing, the observers could gain obser-vation practice before trying it out for real. Or suppose that you wanted to help a participant through a role play requiring the participant to coach a confused employee. As you did this, you could provide a demonstration of effective coaching behavior.
The Same Design Can Often Be Used for Different Purposes
Many creative trainers have a few exercises in their repertoires that they use over and over again with different topics because the exercises are easily adapt-able. Here is an example:
EXAMPLE: For an energizer late in the afternoon, a trainer of a team-building course had participants make paper airplanes and attempt to hit a target. Notic-ing that some participants helped each other out with their airplane designs while others did not, he initiated a dramatic discussion about teamwork. At a THREE TIPS FOR
CREATIVE DESIGNS
problem-solving course, he used the same exercise to point out that many peo-ple changed their designs when their first attempts didn’t work, while others repeated the same essential solution (design) with each attempt.
Published Designs Can Often Be Modified to Suit Your Own Needs
Whenever you examine a published design, think how you might change its purpose, its direction, its length, and so on to achieve the design you are seek-ing. Here is an example:
EXAMPLE: A well-known activity based on a drawing that is either a young girl or an old woman, originally published in Puck in 1915, uses the ambigu-ous picture to examine stereotyping and group pressure on perception. Typi-cally, participants are asked to relate their feelings and opinions about the woman they see in the drawing, not realizing that it can be viewed in two dif-ferent ways. Instead of using this drawing for its traditional purpose, a trainer used it as the basis for an interesting coaching or teaching exercise, employing the following instructions:
1. Obtain two volunteers. One is to serve as a teacher. She should be a per-son who has previously seen the drawing. (You will always have some par-ticipants who have seen it.) The other volunteer is to portray a student who needs assistance in seeing both women.
2. The teacher should try to show the student how to see both women. (If the student is successful in a matter of seconds, replace him or her with someone else.)
3. After the student has seen both women, observers should tell the teacher in terms as descriptive as possible what he or she did to cope with the student.
4. Then discuss what behaviors were helpful or harmful in loosening up the student’s perceptions of the drawing. Compare these behaviors to com-mon teaching or coaching situations.
EXAMPLE: In a popular exercise, teams compete to build the best con-struction-paper tower. The towers are judged by height, aesthetic appeal, and sturdiness. A trainer was looking for a team-building activity to help in the de-velopment of new teams that would eventually work cooperatively with each other. He decided to change “towers” to “houses” and asked each team to con-struct a model of the dream house in which all members would like to live. In-stead of construction paper, teams were given index cards. With these noncompetitive instructions, three completely different and highly creative de-signs emerged and each team was able to proudly display a model of its dream home. Through a simple change in design, the activity had gone from a com-petitive to a noncomcom-petitive experience.
WORKSHEET DESIGNING A TRAINING ACTIVITY
Try your hand at designing a training activity. Choose an objective of your own and develop a creative design with the suggestions you have been given.
Objective:
Method:
Format:
_____ Individual _____ Pairs _____ Small-group _____ Full-group _____ Intergroup Outline:
(include time allotted, buy-in, key points and instructions, materials, physical set-ting, and ending)
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