T/D: We're very excited to talk to you about Spicing Up Your Classroom Training - what is the rationale for spicing up classroom training with interactive activities?

Marquart: The ultimate goal of training is to change behavior.  In order to change behavior you need to give your learners an understanding of what new skills you want them to apply.  Then you want to support them in being able to practice applying those new skills.  Just knowing information is not enough.  For example, I know that I need to exercise several times a week, but that doesn't translate into my always doing it.

When you think about that concept with classroom training you know that you really need to support the learner and appeal to all the different learning styles because not everyone learns the same way.  When you want to spice up classroom training you want to increase their motivation to learn and their engagement.  You want to make sure that they're actually awake, you want to make sure they're paying attention and really support the learners by chunking information into manageable pieces that they can get their heads around.  All of that makes spicing up classroom training with interactive activities really important rather than something that's kind of fun to do.

T/D: Well said!.  For the trainers who don't have a lot of time to re-write their workshops, could you share some quick ways to spice up training?  Usually they use a basic PowerPoint presentation - how can they spice those up?

Marquart: That’s a great question.  There’s nothing wrong with a PowerPoint presentation as a supplemental aid to training..  But when that's the whole training - you lower the lights for a long PowerPoint presentation and suddenly everyone goes to sleep or zones out, they're not going to learn the information that you want them to learn.

If you don’t have a lot of time to completely change the whole thing, work with those PowerPoint presentations and print out the slides.  If you create several sets of them, you can do a number of different interactive activities.  For example, you could take the slides, tape them up to the walls and put blank flip chart paper underneath the slides.  Then just let everyone go ahead and read the slides on their own and react by writing questions or comments underneath the flipchart paper.  Then you as a facilitator can go work with those comments and questions and that really gets people a little bit more in-depth into the content.

You could also break  into groups and give each of them a set of the slides along with a question sheet so that they can do a scavenger hunt for information within the slides.  Or you could give sections of the presentation to different groups so that they can teach parts of the presentation to the whole group.  Another option would be to give them sections that are jumbled and ask them to put them in order.  That really gets folks focusing on new information and really paying attention to the content, rather than just zoning out while someone in the front of the room goes through the material for them.

T/D: They get active instead of passive - that's great.

Marquart: Exactly, we want them to apply the content on the job so getting them to physically work with the ideas and process them cognitively  is really important

T/D: When management or subject matter experts insist on giving lectures rather than facilitating  they just want to get up there and talk. What are some quick and easy ways that we can help them to get their lectures more interactive?

Marquart: Great question. Sometimes people really believe in lectures, but we've got the same risks where people stop paying attention.  That means we're not meeting our goals of changing behavior.  What you can do is work with that subject matter, expert or management to turn a giant lecture into a series of mini-lectures by building in pauses for discussion.

If you build in pauses for discussion you can do things such as a “think, pair, share” where you ask a question and have everyone think about the answer silently for 30 seconds or 60 seconds.  Then have them partner with someone next to them and discuss it.  Then you've got two points where people are thinking about the question.  Then if you have a couple of people share it with the large group you've got three points at which people think about the question and they're actively working with the information rather than passively sitting there.

When you break those large lectures into a series of very short lectures you can create visual aids for the main points in those chunks.  For example, simple things are if you come up with three main points for a section of a lecture just do a quick triangle and write those three points at the points of the triangle.  Or, if it's five points you could do a star or a hand, four points you could do a box sectioned into four.  If it's points that build on each other you could draw a little staircase so you can see that they build on each other.  That helps people who need a visual aid understand the concept a little bit better and it'll also increase the likelihood that they can retain the information.  If they remember what the information is – then we increase the likelihood that they can apply it.

If you're already doing a good job of building interactions, but the monotony starts to creep in, you run the risk of people not paying attention. You can use movement to get the energy up.

Play  games to get people into pairs.  For example, if they have cards that have a match somewhere in the room then they have to mingle and talk to other people in order to find their partner to discuss a question with. If you want to do something pretty quick, you could say, stand up and find a partner who's on the opposite side of the room from you..

One thing that I like to do is have people stand back-to-back rather than facing each other so they don't have the distraction of looking at another person just yet.  They’re standing back to back when I ask a question, then I have them take a couple of deep breaths and think about the answer and only turn around when they're ready to answer the question and discuss it with their partner.  That serves the purpose of getting people up and moving, getting them actually thinking about the question.  Sometimes people just need to breathe a little bit to get their energy up.  That is a very quick and easy way to get people doing the same pair discussion but in a way that adds a little bit of variety.

If it's group discussions that are getting a little bit monotonous, write flip charts with questions ahead of time and place them around the room so they're already posted.  If they're placed around the room away from where people are sitting then people actually have to stand up and move over to where the flip charts are to do the question discussion.  That is going to make them get their blood going, shake them up a little bit so that they're not just sitting there.  That also adds a little bit of variety as well, even if it's still the same concept of pair or group discussions.  Changing up a little bit will give it a feel of having a lot of variety.

T/D: These are wonderful, easy ideas to implement without having to change your design at all. Thank you so much!  Do you have any last tidbits you'd like to share to help us spice up classroom training?

Marquart: I definitely want to encourage people to keep their eyes on the ultimate goal of changing behavior.  So any kind of spicing up that we do shouldn't be just for laughs or just to have a little bit of fun, we've got to keep in mind that we want people to apply their new skills on the job.  Everything should be related to doing that.  There really is a strong rationale and purpose to spicing up those classroom trainings.

Matthea Marquart is the Director of Training  from BELL - Building Educated Leaders for Life.   She has written many training-related articles and a dozen have been published in T&D Magazine, Training Magazine's web edition and Learn Magazine.  She has been recognized by Training Magazine as a young trainer to watch - an honor recognizing accomplished leaders in the training field.  Along with being a member of the American Society of Training and Development she was also a past President of the National Organization for Women and has been a volunteer teacher in the New York school system. You can contact her mattheamarquart@gmail.com.