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Jane Bozarth

Training for Multiple Cultures, the February 2010 Infoline by Andrea Edmundson, earned a glowing review in Learning Solutions Magazine today. Jane Bozarth, three-time author and eLearning Coordinator for the North Carolina Office of State Personnel, praises the issue for its concise overviews and concrete suggestions. Jane summarizes, "Overall, the piece is very tight, focused, and clear, and is certainly worth the $12 purchase price." Read the whole review here. For more information on Cultural Training, consider attending the session Going Global: Developing Cross-Cultural Competence at the ASTD 2010 International Conference and Exposition!

Training for Multiple Cultures, ASTD February 2010 INFOLINE, reviewed by Jane Bozarth

One lesson from my grad school days: the qualitative researcher needs to allow room for new information to emerge. When I was researching Show Your Work: The Payoffs And How-Tos of Working Out Loud (2014: Wiley/ATD), I saw examples falling into several categories: “how I learned…,” “why I learned…,” and “what I learned the hard way…,” and so forth. One category that emerged was “why I did it this way….”  For example, in this blog post, Mig Reyes explains why he chose particular fonts for the redesigned Signals vs Noise site. Reyes sums up the decision with: “I want you to read articles, not text rendered on a screen.”  It’s a fascinating look into an area that most of us take for granted.   Case in Point The 2007 article, “Learning from Explaining: Does It Matter If Mom If Listening,” in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology describes a Vanderbilt study that divided 54 4- and 5-year-old children into three smaller groups. They were given a pattern-matching test involving colored plastic bugs.  The test asked the children to predict the next bug that would appear. The children in Group 1 were asked to simply state their answers. The Group 2 children were asked to explain their answers to themselves. The final group was asked to explain their predictions to their mothers. Do I even need to say which group did better on subsequent tests?  Articulating our decisions helps us learn. Articulating them to others helps more. The researchers noted:  “Learning in a social context emerges partially from the act of explaining with another person in mind…The social context of explaining to others may encourage greater motivation on the task and/or promote better explanations even when the partners do not provide any input.” Application to Adult Learning For the L&D practitioners’ own development, learning to better work out loud and articulate our practice could prove invaluable in dealing with stakeholders. I’d wager a guess that nearly everyone has felt the frustration of trying to explain why: the organization shouldn’t offer 25 multiple-choice quiz items to prove employees people learned somethinga training solution shouldn’t force learners to spend four  minutes on each screen of an e-learning modulefacilitators shouldn’t just read slides aloud to satisfy compliance training requirements. In other words, being able to articulate our rationales helps us learn to better articulate our rationales. Now, consider how you can apply this concept to leadership development, customer service training, and basic communication skill-building initiatives. Encourage learners to move beyond the simple response of “What would you say?” Instead, have learners respond to such questions as: “Why? What result do you think that approach would have on-the-job? How is the co-worker/client/customer likely to respond to your actions?” Beyond talent development endeavors, how could this concept help with project management or process improvement work? You can start by simply asking co-workers: “Why did you do it that way? How did you decide on that path?”   It’s always a challenge for practitioners of any stripe to find the time to reflect on their work, a critical element of learning. Working out loud takes us off autopilot and forces us to confront assumptions, bad habits, and prejudices. Helping others better articulate decisions helps them learn—and if we’re paying attention, we might learn something, too.

How Working Out Loud Helps Us Learn

The role of trainers and instructional designers has been changing for some time now. There are many factors that should make L&D professionals re-think their approach to how training programs and departments operate. However, the most prevalent factor is the need to do more with less more quickly. When you combine smaller staffs and decreasing budgets with the explosion of rapidly changing information, it is clear to see how even the most rapid training development processes can be too slow and insufficient. Fortunately, there are a wide range of social tools and technologies that you can leverage to support and enhance your traditional learning technologies. To provide relevant and valuable training solutions to our organizations, we need to search for the most efficient tools to improve performance. L&D professionals shouldn’t be intimidated by new social tools. The process for employing them is no different than the process for deploying a course. You still need to do the same analysis and design steps. The only difference is that these types of social tools give you a wider selection of options that can be more efficient and effective than the traditional courses and static job aids. In short, using these new approaches can help you and your organization get better results while doing less training. The Social Media for Learning Certificate program is a good starting point for anyone who is looking for new ways to support learning and performance in an organization. The introduction to social media tools and new, creative ways to use them provides a solid foundation to build upon as you evaluate and select these tools as solutions to the challenges you and your organization are facing. Another great thing about this program is that it goes beyond simply introducing the tools; it covers important topics, such as how to effectively use social media tools for learning, engagement strategies, and considerations related to the challenges, opportunities, and other factors that make or break organizational initiatives. Even if you’ve never thought about using these types of social tools, the Social Media for Learning Certificate program will give you real-life, easy to implement examples that can be applied in virtually any environment. Each approach is explored for use in several different learning contexts, including intra-organizational, formal, group, and personal directed learning. And you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone better than Jane Bozarth and Shannon Tipton to guide you through mastering these increasingly important social media approaches to learning and development. They are knowledgeable instructors, who practice what they preach and share their real-world experiences to help make you successful. Done well, social media tools can not only make your existing programs better, they can also extend them to leverage more of the untapped expertise you have within your organization and beyond. After all, social learning is not a new idea. People have been learning from each other for as long as people have existed. Now, we just have the ability to learn so much more from so many more people. So, if you are looking for new and better ways for your learning programs to stay agile, be more efficient, and achieve better results, you owe it to yourself and your organization to understand how to leverage social media for learning. Visit ATD’s Social Media for Learning Certificate program description page to learn more about this useful, practical program.

Jane Bozarth

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