If you’re going to design any form of education, there’s one step that comes before everything else. It isn’t picking your content, and it definitely isn’t building your slides. Here’s the first step, and a story from a middle school science classroom that demonstrates this method’s power to engage even the toughest of groups.
Alfred’s Syllabus Strategy
I call it Alfred’s Syllabus Strategy.
I met a chemistry teacher named Alfred Poor. He was a science teacher for 30 years. And he told me about the first day of class in a middle school context.
First day of class, everybody comes in. Instead of reviewing the syllabus and handing everybody a packet, he just said, “Hey, everybody. We’re going to spend the whole year learning about science. We’re going to spend this whole class with me asking you one question, which is, what are your questions about the natural world? For example, why is fire hot? Do you know? Why is fire hot? Right?”
He shared a couple of examples, then he let everybody think for a minute, and then they just had a giant, crazy middle school energy class question storm. “Why do butterflies’ wings flap this way? Why do they have four sections? Why is a monarch orange?”
Literally 40 minutes of just crazy questions about the natural world.
He recorded all of these, wrote down as many as he could, little snapshots. And at the end, right when the bell was about to ring, he said, “Woo! Thank you, everybody. Thank you for planning our syllabus for the rest of the year. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.”
He took all of the group’s curiosities, what they cared about, what mattered to them, what they were interested in, what they were excited about, and he taught his curriculum, but he weaved in their questions all throughout.
What a profound way to personalize learning.
The First Step Is the Context Hook
Now, I’m not advising that you do exactly that when you design every single training.
The lesson or magic to be learned here is what Alfred tapped into. The first step in the training design process is tapping into what does your audience actually care about. The umbrella I would give this is the context hook.
Let’s say you have 50 people coming into a new onboarding training at an organization. You have 50 people coming in. They’re attending because they’re getting paid.
The first step in the training design process is not assuming that their attendance leads to their attention.
So the first step in the training design process is doing something to take and convert their attendance into attention.
This is the same reason purposeful icebreakers for meetings work, and why the weak ones don’t. It was never about the game. It was about whether people arrived in the room with you.
Why I Care About This
If this is our first time meeting, I get to do this for a living. I’ve carved out a niche teaching people how to design really engaging, memorable, lasting training.
Whether it’s working with 150 internal trainers at a pharma company, or teaching 1,500 nurse educators how to onboard and educate and train up all the nursing staff that gets hired.
My mutual friend Jonathan Courtney, who runs facilitator.com, and I met in Berlin for a couple of days. After spending a couple of days together, he said, “I think, Chad, you might be the training whisperer, the trainer whisperer.”
It’s that ability to take what otherwise would be relatively boring content and turn it into something else. That’s a passion of mine. I love taking content, plugging it into this side of my head, and popping it out the other side as an experience.
Step Two: Stop Training, Start Inviting
That’s probably step two in the training process. Taking whatever you need to get into people’s heads.
Let’s say you have all this content. Ideally, you put that on a USB drive and then just plug it into somebody’s brain. Except that doesn’t work yet.
So the next best thing is inviting them into something. In fact, just stop training. Just stop training.
Start inviting people into small, medium, and big experiences where they get to actually interact with and pass the material and the content and the ideas through their brain, not just receive it in a one-way PowerPoint.
My Actual First Step: A Blank Piece of Paper
So here I am telling you. Let me show you.
My actual first step to design any training is getting a blank piece of paper. And this is even if you have a mandated training that has 50 slides that you must present because it’s some law or something. Doesn’t matter.
I’m still getting a blank piece of paper and I’m writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
This is the practical, tactical foundation of what I would call The Contribution Method. For me, The Contribution Method is the way to design any training, any presentation, in a way that actually cuts your prep in half.
Cuts your prep time in half at minimum. Cuts your prep time in half or more, but doubles your impact.
That is a promise I’m willing to stand by. If that doesn’t happen for you when you really masterfully practice The Contribution Method, you can write me an angry email.
The Free Field Guide
There’s a free field guide that should super not be free. It’s an immense amount of value that I packed into it, and I am giving it to you for free.
One of the pages is literally a “Will Your Next Session Land?” checklist. Whatever thing is on your calendar coming up, if you just print it out and go through and check these five boxes with this method, I would say that I can actually predict whether your next training or session will land or not based on what’s on that checklist.
You can grab it, along with printable cards and other free resources, by registering your interest in The Contribution Method.
Experience This Live
Want to go deeper? Join a room with other facilitators, trainers, and leaders by registering your interest for the Connectors Summit this December, a live experience where we come together to practice, connect, and reset.
Have an awesome day.
