Weald Learning Guiding Principles

Founder, Colin Smith, shares the core principles that guide Weald learning’s offering

Weald Learning guiding principles

Since starting out on my journey to become a facilitator/learning programme designer 10 years ago, I’ve developed some principles that guide my thinking (and therefore Weald Learning’s thinking) - if you like, they are like a manifesto for how we approach learning.

Understand how people learn

This changes how you design and facilitate, and directly impacts on outcomes. Human beings are complex beasts, and there is plenty of good theory about how they learn best, and also how to design learning to achieve the outcomes you are looking for.

Pertinent topics like Behavioural Science, Psychology and Instructional Design Theory help guide the way we approach our work for clients. Good reads “Make it Stick”; “How we Learn”; 

Evidence-based methods only

Don’t be tempted by the many unsubstantiated myths around learning. We’re all surprisingly familiar with concepts like Learning Styles & Millennials, but the evidence suggests these concepts don’t stand up to testing. We need to be really careful about embedding un-proven and unhelpful method into our work, without recognising them for what they are. Good read: “Millennials, Goldfish, and other training misconceptions”

Measure the impact, not just the satisfaction

There’s no point in doing it, unless it makes a lasting, measurable impact.

I have so much to say about this… I worked mostly in sales & marketing in my pre-L&D career, and then in leadership roles in fast-growing media tech firms like LinkedIn and Yahoo!, and so business results are ingrained in my thinking - Results; outcomes; performance… whatever your taxonomy. 

I find it hard to square the way that learning has typically been measured, with the hard business outcomes I was used to previously. I strive to find these hard measures all the time. Good read: “Learning Analytics”

Outcomes, Outcomes, Outcomes

Learning design should not begin without identifying the outcomes upfront - if you don’t know what you want the learners to know, or how you want them to behave differently after the training, then you shouldn’t start developing content for them. 

For learning to land, we shouldn’t be afraid to make the experience difficult 

When I am designing learning experiences, I’m always stretching for that sweet spot, where the challenge is just hard enough, and just satisfying enough.

Not only does the science suggest learning sticks if the challenge is harder, but we are also borrowing from the concept of ‘Flow’. Flow is that magical state where you’re completely absorbed in what you’re doing, where time seems to pass so fast it’s like it doesn’t exist at all. It’s the sweet spot between challenge, and the skills required to complete the challenge. (Good read: “Flow”)

Varied & Interleaved

I used to coach football (soccer) in my late teens and early twenties, and I was taught to break down a technique into its constituent parts and teach each one in isolation, so it was easier to learn each part and then put it all together at the end. In fact, the science suggests that it’s more effective to interleave more than one type of problem within a topic at a time and scatter new problem types through your programme.

The very act of having to learn more than one thing at once, helps you to recognise the interconnectedness, and helps with application. This doesn’t just help with the learning process. It also helps with focus by keeping the experience varied and interesting

There is no substitute for application in context. Get them applying the learning to their own stuff quickly.

When I was writing my first ever training programme (I wrote a two-day programme on Digital Media Sales, initially for a large magazine publisher’s sales team) it was packed with material... all keynote… Had I delivered it that way, it would have been a firehose of information, and wouldn’t have landed. I was very lucky to be working with another (more experienced) sales trainer, who advised me to think about a 60/40 split of content to activity/engagement. Not particularly scientific, but it taught me the importance of engaging the audience. If you’ve ever sat through a product training that is a firehose, you’ll recognise how hard it is to remain attentive. More importantly though, the whole point of any corporate learning is to be able to apply the new knowledge/capability in a work environment, so it’s vital to embed some sort of practice in context into any learning programme. 

There is no one single better medium for learning

Face-to-face, online live, online recorded, reading, learning in the flow of work; small groups; big groups; in-platform… I could go on… Definitive statements like “I much prefer face to face”, or “everything has to be delivered online” don’t take into account the material, the context, the desired outcome, the audience, and multiple other factors.

Choose the right medium, or preferably the right blend, for the situation to achieve the outcomes you want.

Learner-centred means timely and appropriate delivery of knowledge and skills in the right context, through the right medium 

This is where it gets hard, and follows on from the previous point about the medium for learning. One of the biggest challenges I think L&D folks face is making sure the learning sticks and is applied in practice to improve performance.  

To illustrate my point, imagine someone has attended a one hour webinar, and then 4 days later, needs to apply their learning exactly when it’s needed. There’s a reasonable chance they’ll be unlikely to remember most of what they learned. Similarly, imagine someone who has attended a 3-day face-to-face workshop, and then needs to apply the learning at a critical moment in preparation for a client meeting, but they can’t quite remember that critical point that might help right now. “Now, where was that workbook?”…

We should be constantly striving for the right blend, that recognises the learners ACTUAL context, and using the right medium to make sure the knowledge/skill is transferred effectively, and can it be done when it is required (or as close to as possible). This is Not easy, but it’s worthy. Good read: “Driving performance through learning”

A good facilitator, or a bad one, can make all the difference. Really good ones are pretty rare.

Facilitation is a skill. Weirdly, there aren’t many (if any) training programmes to teach excellent facilitation skills, but an excellent facilitator makes a big difference to outcomes. Typically, (you may recognise this) at the end of every session, there’s a feedback score for the facilitator, and a feedback score for the session (and maybe an NPS score). People just tend to like people, so the facilitator score (in part) tells you how liked they are - not how good. IMHO a large percentage of the session score is down to how good the facilitator is.

I won’t tolerate facilitation mediocrity - it kills good content.