Lesson Planning

We provide a leadership series of classes that are unique in our industry. Our bread and butter is the delivery of eLearning on safety training and compliance training. Providing these leadership classes are soft skills training that we rarely have the chance to provide to our learning cohort, but one that we are exceptionally good at. We use facilitators for providing this training who are not just subject matter experts in the industry but are also experts in delivering our content. They have the capability of weaving themes throughout the class and guiding the trainee to learn the content along those "theme roadways" without deliberately or blatantly knocking them over the head with the information. It's a far more dynamic and flexible way of teaching and many of our regular instructors can not easily make the jump from the hard skills training they are used to to the facilitation style that is more along the lines of the developmental and nurturing perspectives that are needed for the leadership training. 

But how much freedom is there in our lesson planning and modules? Are we too set in stone? Are we able to react, adjust and adapt as the lesson unfolds?

 One thing I ran across when writing one of my papers for my class was this quote from Pratt & Collins on the Teaching Perspective Inventory (TPI) regarding the Transmission Perspective, effective teaching assumes instructors will have mastery over their content" (p. 3). Under the descriptions of Nurturing Perspective and Developmental Perspective, the mastering of the information by the teacher is not highlighted, instead the relationship between the learner and the teacher and the learner to the material is more dominant. 

I find that our facilitators in these leadership classes have an overwhelming mastery of the content to the point that they know each learning objective and can guide the learners through the morass of discussions, role-plays, and thought exercises so that they are able to change their views and perspectives on their roles at work and in life. This seems like a combination of nurturing and developmental but without that feature of content mastery as described in transmission the results of the Nurturing and Developmental perspectives would be much harder to achieve. 

Secondly, what I find amazing as I watch our facilitators deliver these classes is that they deliberately set up situations to allow the class to jump off the rails or leave the confines of their lesson plans to see where the class takes it. They do try to guide them back at times if they see the class going off on tangents, but there have also been learning moments when they allow the class to go off on their own and after the class, we update the content and modules to help allow the same tangential experimentation to occur in future classes. 

When reading Pratt & Collins I see that our facilitators are both using Developmental perspective by combining "effective questioning and ‘bridging’ knowledge that challenges learners to move from relatively simple to more complex forms of thinking" (p.3)  and Nurturing perspective in that "their teaching always strives for a balance between challenging people to do their best, while supporting and nurturing their efforts to be successful" (p. 3). The facilitators embrace those moments when the lesson doesn't unfold exactly as they intended. From the standpoint of an auditor, it's a remarkable capability and one that I hope to leverage as I continue learning. 

Pratt, Daniel D. & Collins, John B. (2000). "The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI)," Adult Education Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2000/papers/68