Are you familiar with how to engage participants to want to actively learn?  

Facilitating learning is not a spectator sport. In a formal learning environment, an effective facilitator will continually adapt to their learners to get all learner to participate.

Increasingly, more of us asked to train others.  You could be a subject matter expert, a manager, or perhaps you are in HR or Learning and Development.  Anyone in the workplace can be asked to train or coach others to learn a new task or upskill another to take on a new skill required.

Often, training requests can come at short notice. Without a plan, the risk is that you will fall into the trap of information spam. Talking at people.  When interactions are predominantly one way – it is easy to disengage. Regardless of the short notice, the best time spent is spent planning what you will be facilitating or training.

With planning, active learner engagement is more likely to occur. There are several ways to engage adult learners in the workplace. Which ones do you use? Which should you be adding into your next planning and training session?

Research suggests that incorporation of some interrelated activities into any learning course, workshop, or program can significantly boost participants’ engagement. When engagement occurs, participants are connected emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally. This, then positively influences the learning and knowledge of learners.

This true regardless of the learning is occurring in a face to face workshop or if the session is being conducted virtually.

To prevent learners straying from the course and to keep them engaged in learning, there are some common tips that every Facilitator should incorporate into their overall approach.

“The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. “ David Ausubel, educational psychologist

Here are the measures that you can take to engage learners in learning:

• Tap into learners’ prior knowledge
• Determine learners’ interests
• Design highly relevant learning activities
• Integrate Modern Technology
• Foster Competition among Learners
• Provide Timely and Regular Feedback in Terms of Progress
• Design training with a learning model in mind such as Howard’s Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory.

Let’s discuss each one of them in more details.

Tap into Learners’ Prior Knowledge

You can motivate learners for learning if, being a Facilitator, you link the course outline or program with their prior knowledge. Learners are rarely interested in taking up lectures when they hold no prior knowledge of the topic.  Consider sending out a survey, or posting a topic in a learning community portal.

You may choose to ask some multiple-choice questions which are based on the information you expect them to know already. This will help you in spotting the areas where you need to fill the gaps in understanding and leaving out the ones learners are already aware of. After all, none of us likes to have our time wasted. Use the gathered information to build a course that would provide them with additional knowledge and link it with their existing understanding. Nonetheless, tapping learners’ prior knowledge is an effective way to start the new course and an even better way to get learners involved with learning projects, right from the beginning.

“Ok this is like, when I …”

Figuring out what your learners already know can significantly assist you in pitching your training following the right academic challenge level, and to identify and correct many misconceptions of the learners. For instance, you may start your lecture with a few open-ended questions, requiring learners to answer them in pairs.

“People don’t argue with their own data. Bob Pike.”

Who’s responsibility is training transfer? Who is responsible for ensuring that learning takes place for any one person? And who is responsible for minimizing the disruptions that can keep learning from taking place?

• The trainer or facilitator?
• The learner?
• Other participants?

All of the above. In a workplace learning environment, it is important to respect your participants and treat them as adults.

The goal of most workplace training is to produce improved results on the job. Success is measured not in the content covered or tests passed but according to what is actually used on the job. If we keep that in mind, we see that responsibility for the learning process, and its on-the-job application, goes beyond the instructor and participant.

Let us look specifically at the trainer since that’s the role. A trainers two goals in dealing with difficult (not engaged) learner should be the following:

1. If possible, get the difficult participant on board and
2. Minimize any negative impact the difficult participant might have on others in the class.

If the participants in your class are like most, they crave the acceptance, acknowledgement, and support of their peers. The more you use small groups in your program, the more this truism will be apparent in reducing the tendency for anyone to be a difficult participant

Design highly relevant learning activities

Key to engagement is that the learners perceive your designed activities as meaningful and helpful. No one likes training for trainings sake or childish games that have no direct correlation to the learning outcome. Some research suggests that learners cannot be engaged in learning if they do not consider their learning activities worthy of putting efforts or investing time. If it doesn’t resonate, they are likely to disengage with the course entirely, as a natural response.

Therefore, before you design the learning activities you must take advantage of their areas of interest, and their learning preferences. To make sure that the developed learning activities will motivate the learner to get more engaged in learning, you must keep them personally meaningful via relating activities back to their role and learning outcomes.  Debriefing the activity and asking learners to do this also helps to embed learning and relevance of the activity.

Consider utilising an expert or adult modelling to demonstrate why a particularly designed activity is worth investing time and effort. During the activity it is important to explain and when and how this can be applied in their real lives. This can be achieved by utilising a subject matter expert in the group and demonstration.

Key tip: Remember each learning group is different. So, target the learning activity. What will work effectively in one learner group, may not work in another.  This is particularly true to senior executives and tradespeople.

Foster Competition among Learners

Competition is a great way to motivate learners to learn better or to make them engaged in learning more naturally. When a Facilitator develops a sense of competition among his/her learners, it encourages the learners to do what is needed to remain ahead of others. In other words, the sense of competition is basically learner’s continuous personal evaluation which they make to understand how well they can succeed in a challenge or learning activity.

According to many researchers, if learners perform an activity effectively, it can create a positive impact, leading to more learning engagement. To strengthen this sense of competition amongst learners, the developed learning activities must be:

• A little beyond the current proficiency level of the learner
• Designed to help learners show understanding throughout the learning activity
• Well incorporated with feedbacks that will eventually assist learners in their learning process.

This can be achieved through the creation of gameshow type quizzes and learning competitions. An ideal way to do this is to have the learners create the quiz questions and answers from their learning materials. This enables the learner to research, review and confirm their new knowledge.

Provide Timely and Regular Feedback in Terms of Progress

Learners need to know the weak areas in which they need to put efforts to improve. And if learners fail to recognize low-performance areas, they fail to improve their learning.

Providing feedback is crucial to give learners an explanation of where they are performing satisfactorily and where they need to increase their efforts.  When learners receive regular feedback about their performance they respond more positively and remember the experience of what is being learned.

This can be achieved in the learning environment via debriefing activities, acknowledging excellent examples, having learners teach each other new skills, assessments, and have learners share the correct answers post assessment, learning evaluations and post formal learning debrief.

However, if you wait too long to provide feedback, the learning moment gets lost and the learner fails to connect the feedback with the required action.

Multiple intelligence Model

Another way to increase learner engagement is via the use of the Multiple intelligence model.

“Anything worth teaching can be presented in multiple different ways. These multiple different ways can make use of multiple intelligences.” Howard Gardner.

The use of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence (MI) research can also increase engagement in the learning environment. MI focuses on the strengths of a student. Understanding the strengths or intelligences in your classroom can support you taking them academically further. Teaching new or difficult concepts through a learner’s strengths has been proven to increase achievement according to his research. Here are the seven multiple intelligences, as well as how a teacher can use them (according to Gardner):

1. Visual-Spatial– think in terms of physical space, as do architects and sailors. Very aware of their environments. They like to draw, do jigsaw puzzles, read maps, daydream. They can be taught through drawings, verbal and physical imagery. Tools include models, graphics, charts, photographs, drawings, 3-D modelling, video, videoconferencing, television, multimedia, texts with pictures/charts/graphs.
2. Bodily-kinesthetic– use the body effectively, like a dancer or a surgeon. Keen sense of body awareness. They like movement, making things, touching. They communicate well through body language and be taught through physical activity, hands-on learning, acting out role-playing. Tools include equipment and real objects.
3. Musical– show sensitivity to rhythm and sound. They love music, but they are also sensitive to sounds in their environments. They may study better with music in the background. They can be taught by turning lessons into lyrics, speaking rhythmically, tapping out time. Tools include musical instruments, music, radio, stereo, CD-ROM, multimedia.
4. Interpersonal– understanding, interacting with others. These students learn through interaction. They have many friends, empathy for others, street smarts. They can be taught through group activities, seminars, dialogues. Tools include the telephone, audio conferencing, time and attention from the instructor, video conferencing, writing, computer conferencing, E-mail.
5. Intrapersonal– understanding one’s own interests, goals. These learners tend to shy away from others. They’re in tune with their inner feelings; they have wisdom, intuition and motivation, as well as a strong will, confidence and opinions. They can be taught through independent study and introspection. Tools include books, creative materials, diaries, privacy, and time. They are the most independent of the learners.
6. Linguistic– using words effectively. These learners have highly developed auditory skills and often think in words. They like reading, playing word games, making up poetry or stories. They can be taught by encouraging them to say and see words, read books together. Tools include computers, games, multimedia, books, tape recorders, and lecture.
7. Logical-Mathematical– reasoning, calculating. Think conceptually, abstractly and can see and explore patterns and relationships. They like to experiment, solve puzzles, ask cosmic questions. They can be taught through logic games, investigations, mysteries. They need to learn and form concepts before they can deal with details.

All these effective approaches to boost learners’ engagement in learning are not complex but they might require you to invest adequate time in planning. If your learners are not engaged, you are wasting your time.

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Each time you conduct a training session, as learning professionals, we need to adapt to our environment and audience. The content has been written so it is easily adapted to the needs of your learners and audience.

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About the author: Colleen Condon

Colleen likes to keep things creative in all that she does, often using marshmallows as a source of inspiration.

Everyone knows that ongoing learning is essential for both personal and professional success and yet, for many, this means hours of attending dead boring training or completing’ losing the will to live’ eLearning modules. Colleen’s mission is to end tedious professional development while ensuring targeted outcomes for learners and businesses.

Colleen has honed her skills over the last 20 years across multiple industries and locations. Her previous role saw her overseeing the training and development needs of over 60, 000 employees across 13 countries in the APAC region.  This enabled her to hone skills that celebrated diversity and understanding human commonality through learning, and that in the absence of a common language, flip charts and coloured markers helped her to overcome most challenging situations.

In 2019, Colleen founded her own business, Facilitated Training, harnessing her global learning experiences and sharing them through ready to use learning resources, specialising in leadership, mentoring, guest speaking, creative problem solving, filling the gap of high quality, customisable training resources and tools.