It’s become obvious (even to me) that there are a host of teachers moving to L&D. There are also a number of initiatives to support them. Naturally, I wondered what I could do to assist. With my reputation as a cynic apparently well-secured, I’m choosing to call out some bad behaviors. So here are some superstitions for new practitioners to watch out for!
As background, these aren’t the myths that I discuss in my book on the topic. That would be too obvious. Instead, I’m drawing on the superstitions from the same tome, that is things that people practice without necessarily being aware, let alone espousing them. No, these manifest through behaviors and expectations rather than explicit exhortation.
- Giving people information will lead them to change. While we know this isn’t true, it still seems to be prevalent. I’ve argued before about why I think this exists, but what matters is what it leads to. That is, information dump and knowledge-test courses. What instead we need is not just a rationale, but also practice and then ongoing support for the change.
- If it looks like school, it’s learning. We’ve all been to school, and thus we all know what learning looks like, right? Except many school practices are only useful for passing tests, not for actually solving real problems and meeting real goals. (Only two things wrong: the curriculum and the pedagogy, otherwise school’s fine.) It, however, creates barriers when you’re trying to create learning that actually works. Have people look at the things they learned outside of school (sports, hobbies, crafts, etc) for clues.
- People’s opinion is a useful metric for success. Too often, we just ask ‘did you like it’. Or, perhaps, a ‘do you think it was valuable’. While the latter is better than the former, it’s still not good enough. The correlation between people’s evaluation of the learning and the actual impact is essentially zero. At least for novices. You need more rigorous criteria, and then test to achieve.
- A request for a course is a sufficient rationale to make one. A frequent occurrence is a business unit asking for a course. There’s a performance problem (or just the perception of one), and therefore a course is the answer. The only problem is that there can be many reasons for a performance problem that have nothing to do with knowledge or skill gaps. You should determine what the performance gap is (to the level you’ll know when it’s fixed), and the cause. Only when the cause is a skill gap does a course really make sense.
- A course is always the best answer. See above; there are lots of reasons why performance may not be up to scratch: lack of resources, wrong incentives, bad messaging, the list goes on. As Harless famously said, “Inside every fat course there‘s a thin job aid crying to get out.” Many times we can put knowledge in the world, which makes sense because it’s actually hard to get information and skills reliably in the head.
- You can develop meaningful learning in a couple of weeks. The rise of rapid elearning tools and a lack of understanding of learning has led to the situation where someone will be handed a stack of PPTs and PDFs and a rapid authoring tool and expected to turn out a course. Which goes back to the first two problems. While it might take that long to get just a first version, you’re not done. Because…
- You don’t need to test and tune. There’s this naive expectation in the industry that if you build it, it is good. Yet the variability of people, the uncertainty of the approach, and more, suggest that courses should be trialed, evaluated, and revised until actually achieving the necessary change. Beware the ‘build and release’ approach to learning design, and err on the side of iterative and agile.
This isn’t a definitive list, but hopefully it’ll help address some of the worst practices in the industry. If you’re wary of these superstitions for new practitioners, you’ll likely have a more successful career. Fingers crossed and good luck!
There’s some overlap here with messages to CXOs 1 and 2, but a different target here.
Great article, Clark, and as a teacher-turned-L&D specialist, there’s a lot of merit to this. One area that I think we disagree on consistently (as I’ve seen you note this before) is the criticism of schools – at least not in its entirety. While we’re probably in lock-step regarding useless standardized tests, as far as actual techniques used modernly, you might be surprised. If you look at books like “The First Days of School” by Harry Wong, you’d find many techniques encouraged in the L&D field, just by different names and/or aged down. Not every teacher knows about or uses these tools, but a lot do, and it’s a very positive experience compared to what people think about for the stereotypical classroom environment.
Anyway, I think another great piece of advice is to lean into your teammates (unless you’re a department of one). Planning and developing courses in this field is great when you have peer review and quality assurance checks built in to your outlining and development process. It takes what you’d develop on your own (which might be fine) and punches it up by adding additional expertise to the recipe. In the end you get something stronger than what you could do on your own. If one joins a team that doesn’t have this structure, it’s worth encouraging them to move in that direction. When you’re used to solo lesson planning it doesn’t always occur to you that this is available!
Dave, I agree that my characterization of school is broad-brush. However, even in a good school district that my kids attended, there were a lot of bad practices, such as making colorful posters that make the classroom look good for visitation, but have no learning benefit. Of course, there also were, as you point out, some good ones. Also totally agree with your emphasis on the value of collaboration. In my consulting with orgs, I emphasize that the more you do things together, and as you suggest at least have peer review, the better the outcome. Thanks for weighing in!
My only argument to that one, Clark, is that the posters impact the learning environment positively by making it reflect the students within it, which does benefit learning. It helps create a safe place for learning, questioning, etc.
Now, maybe the posters were just fluff, and I get why that seems problematic, and I’d agree that they ought to be related to some sort of learning activity.