Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, Ed.D., owner of Custom Professional Learning, LLC. While I’m a program evaluator, my main lane is helping people design rave worthy workshops, courses, trainings, and meetings. I’m passionate about high-quality teaching and learning and bring that lens to all my work.
As evaluators, we spend loads of time and energy helping others learn from their programs, their data, and their outcomes. We owe our own sessions that same attention, whether they’re capacity-building workshops, client trainings, quarterly updates, program retrospectives, or funder briefings. Any time you gather people to share information, reflect, or decide together, it’s about learning, and a little thinking drawn from instructional design goes a long way. Here are three tips worth considering before your next gathering.
Hot Tips
1. Start with the outcome, not the agenda
Before you build an agenda, think about the session’s purpose. What should be different because this session happened? What should participants be able to do as a result? Will they build new knowledge or skills? Will the info help inform a decision they need to make? Once the outcomes are clear, plan the topics you need to cover, along with interactive strategies for sharing information so that people will learn it and use it.
2. Right-size what you share
More is not better when it comes to learning. Our working memory can only hold onto a few bits of information at once. Past that, people won’t absorb more. Instead, they’ll feel frustrated and overwhelmed, and will check out. It’s an easy trap for evaluators sharing findings since every data point and bit of context can feel essential, and it’s so tempting to include them all. Before your next session, sort what you have into “need-to-knows” and “nice-to-knows.” Then, let go of those “nice-to-knows,” relegating them to a handout or another session. Trimming your content back makes room for what matters most to land and stick with people.
3. Design for learning, not engagement
Engagement ends when the session ends. Learning shouldn’t. People are pushing hard on the idea of making meetings (and presentations, trainings, etc.) engaging, but what good is engagement if people walk out of the room having learned nothing new? For real learning to happen, whether you’re calling the session a meeting, training, or workshop, you need to incorporate activities that encourage retention and use. It doesn’t have to be complicated! Try building in a few well-crafted question prompts for people to reflect on and discuss in pairs or small groups. Help them make connections from the new material you’re sharing to what they already know. Give them opportunities to talk, write, and share as they’re learning. Use sticky notes (physical or virtual) to generate ideas individually and together, then order or categorize those ideas and make sense of them. For learning to endure, people need to process new information, connect it to their prior knowledge, and practice applying it. So many simple techniques can give people opportunities to do this.
Rad Resources
I frequently write LinkedIn articles related to this topic:
- Three Key Decisions That Shape a Successful Workshop
- Too Much Content, Not Enough Learning: What to Leave Out of Your Workshop or Course
- Beyond Information: How to Design Workshops That Create Action
My favorite books that support designing any kind of session with people:
- The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
- The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath
- Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.