Wait a minute...

With the unexpected arrival (at least at a much greater level) of teleworking and online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many trainers and facilitators have struggled to find the most suitable solution to deliver their classes to their students.

This boom in live remote learning has caused much debate about whether or not platforms help facilitators meet the expectations of their own students (and themselves) or whether online teaching is less stellar and effective than face-to-face classes.

A few years back, InSync producer Jakob Hofmann wrote some fun producer haiku.

Welcome to 2021.

It seems that everyone is taking a collective breath as we look forward with expectation of promise and insight in a new workplace environment largely mandated by long-term impacts of COVID-19. By the time the pandemic will be deemed “over”, a large fraction of the global developed workforce will have spent nearly two years in work-at-home environments, as many companies are targeting late 2021 for reopening their offices. Some others have rethought their workplace policy altogether. In October, DropBox announced its “Virtual First” strategy - as an ongoing policy “remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.” There is also evidence that employees want some voice in when and how they work from home, seeking a model of “flexible work” that complements, rather than intrudes upon, life at home.[i]

For the past 16 years it’s been an InSync tradition to offer a free “Holiday* Stressbusters” session in late November. It’s meant to be a helpful, mostly-lighthearted look at ways of coping with things particular to the holidays: too many parties with too much food and, ahem, beverage, the feeling of being overwhelmed by so much planning and buying and wrapping and whatnot, dealing with the tensions of family gatherings, etc.

*We specify that this is nondenominational and nonspecific. I like to note the day in December 2006 I finished graduate Statistics. However, most session conversation does tend to gravitate toward Christmas.

I don’t remember what prompted this tweet in January, 2012, but I feel it even more strongly now than I did then. Since the onset of COVID, we have seen 3 phases of its effects on training and training delivery:

Have you ever been sent to training that just didn’t ring true? Perhaps it presented steps as too simple (“Then just get everyone to agree and implement your plan”) or offered unworkable performance tips (“Set aside a half-hour every day to reflect on your obstacles and achievements”) or included a tipoff that the designer had no idea about the reality of your work (My postal-service husband says he laughs at the unrealistic training videos he’s assigned to watch, because “the customers always have exact change”.)

Years ago when I was teaching virtual facilitation skills, there was a section called “disaster recovery”. I poked fun at this, saying it seemed a bit too dramatic and asking if there had ever really been a Code Blue in a breakout room. Truth is, though, sometimes things do go wrong, and great staff with a great plan can keep hiccups from turning into full-blown failures.

Many years ago - can it really be nearly 20? - I was first learning to work in the virtual classroom. Back then, the tech was very new and still often wonky and unpredictable, so it was a given that this was a team endeavor, with the facilitator always working with a producer. I didn’t know at the time what a gift this would turn out to be: When I introduced virtual classroom events in my workplace, no one ever questioned the need for and the value of a producer, and no one ever asked me to try flying solo.

While researching evidence-based practices for the virtual classroom, I was looking for specific examples of activities that supported proven approaches like retrieval practice and feedback. What I found mostly were hundreds -- literally hundreds -- of sites and blog posts and articles promising ideas for “engagement and interaction” that were usually nothing more than lists of “icebreakers”, often just the same ones repeated from site to site and post to post. And y’all: I remember doing “2 Truths and a Lie” at a trainers meeting in 1996, and it wasn’t new then.

A critical element to learning is retrieval practice; the opportunity to revisit and apply new material. Such practice, coupled with meaningful feedback, can help ensure that learners understand material correctly, that they can find it - retrieve it - when needed, even after time has passed, and that they can apply it to real-world situations. Offering meaningful practice opportunities and providing good feedback can also contribute to a sense of social presence, discussed in my last post, Facilitation Tips Series, Part 1: Presence.