Developing skills: by doing or by watching?
IAP2A’s trainers have recently been reviewing and discussing our new courses: Engagement Facilitation and Engagement Evaluation. We all agreed that IAP2A courses are ‘doing courses’; active, talking, sharing and developing others. Some senior practitioners stress the need to teach new entrants streetwise skills because of the stresses sometimes experienced in engagement.
Yet some course reviews question the time spent on group work. “How can we learn from someone who is also there to learn?” “Can the trainers just teach more? I really want to hear from them and be told the best way to approach situations.”
I was thinking of this while assembling an IKEA desk with my 19-year-old niece who was very excited to finally be doing a ‘DYI’ creation. I was carefully counting and sorting all the bits and scanning the document and she’d found a YouTube demonstration and was putting it together. Soon she was directing me until we realised the person on the video didn’t follow the directions. Did that matter?
I wonder if this feature of the smart phone generation – look and copy and do – will create an immediate result – a desk this morning – at the expense of thought, interpretation, practice and patience.
Engagement practitioners have to apply generic personal skills taught in management courses, such as active listening and questioning, when facilitating. We need to tailor and apply methods and processes to our specific situations. And we need to practise because a ‘doing’ skill needs repetition and part of the reason for coming to a course is to learn and practise in a safe context.
But we do want to encourage participants to become more watchful: not just to think, “Oh, that went badly”, but to question, “Why did the facilitation not work as expected?” “At what point did it turn – did we miss it?” and so on.
Our course development Project Panels are discussing how to craft our courses for effective learning and skill development, and consider different ways. IAP2 Australasia is being asked to design learning experiences that are ‘not just face-to-face training’ and that will bring more challenges to skills development. But one thing we do know about video DYI efforts: it takes more than one person to build or do anything. Or does it?
Last week in a course, Martin Plumb, Dept Community Services NT, was busy sewing a button on his shirt. He explained that he’d asked the concierge for a needle and thread but, because he’d never done this before and he was away from home, sought a ‘how to’ from YouTube. Looks like the multimedia future is here.