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Megan R. Bell is the director of Enterprise Performance Excellence for FastMed Urgent Care. A versatile professional, Bell has excelled across business operations, corporate training, higher education, and creative agencies. Driven by a passion for creative storytelling and effective project management, she advances business goals while fostering inclusion. As a mentor, she champions “graceful leadership,” combining self-awareness, communication, confidence, and empathy to empower teams. Her presentations cover project communication, emotional intelligence in facilitation, and building a professional brand. Educated at UNC-CH, WCU, and NCSU, Bell brings her North Carolina roots and deep love of learning to every leadership role, firmly believing trust, respect, and fun are essential to team success.

Megan Bell

In a world of many distractions, presentation skills matter.

Leave a Lasting Impact

November 2023 - TD Magazine

Foster a productive midday learning session and increase engagement with this well-balanced menu of best practices.

No Soggy Lunch & Learns

Megan Dillon is a manager of instructional design. She has experience developing and overseeing successful onboarding, continuous education, and leadership development programs across various industries. Megan believes L&D have the potential to empower individuals to perform at optimal levels. She is passionate about developing strategic learning programs that inspire, motivate, and create change across entire organizations.Megan grew up in Charlotte, NC, and graduated from Queens University of Charlotte. She resides in Charlotte, NC, with her husband and two busy little boys.

Megan Dillon

Megan Kohler is an assistant teaching professor and learning designer at Pennsylvania State University. She specializes in crafting online, technology-enhanced, and blended learning experiences. Recognized for her quality design work, Kohler is a recipient of the Marion G. Mitchell Award for Innovative Teaching. Kohler is a seasoned leader in education, having served in numerous roles with the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference, including overall conference co-chair, program co-chair, and chair of presenter services. She has also served on EDUCAUSE’s Courseware Advisory Board, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Kohler’s research, supported by a Schreyer Institute Scholarship, focuses on supporting neurodivergent learners in higher education. As a 2024 Teach Access Fellow, Kohler advocates for inclusive and accessible learning experiences for all students, especially those with neurocognitive differences. Her research on neurodiversity and her book The Multidisciplinary Instructional Designer, has been featured in numerous podcasts and conferences.

Megan Kohler

Megan Galloway is the talent development manager for U.S. Engineering Company Holdings. She believes that all companies can unlock fulfillment and engagement for their people with the right tools and conversations.

Megan Galloway

The next time you feel angry, take the presidential route to expressing your emotions.

Take a Moment to Check Your Emotions

How do I become successful? How do I advance my career? How do I become the best possible me in the workplace? We have all asked these questions, and have tormented ourselves with trying to find the right answers. While there is no right answer, there is a place to start—figuring out who you are. Now, Discover Your Strengths, written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, allows you to take an assessment to discover and benefit from your strengths.Many people go through their daily work accomplishing task after task, with an inkling of what they are good at or what they enjoy. However, do we take those insights and mold our career around them? Maybe, maybe not. Now, Discover Your Strengths focuses on the idea that people should capitalize on their strengths and manage around their weaknesses. This means we should take what we are good at and flourish versus spending time trying to better our faults.As a society, we are used to the notion that we need to be good at everything, but in reality, that isn’t possible. No matter how hard we try, there will always be things that we are not good at. So, why do we waste our time on things that are not our strengths? The book is not suggesting that you should never try something you don’t believe you will succeed at, instead it encourages you to get to know what you are good at and truly use it to your advantage.Now, Discover Your Strengths comes with a unique code for you to take Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder Assessment online. From the assessment you’ll discover your top five of the 34 strengths that they have developed. These strengths range from achiever to communicator to learner and so forth. Once you are aware of your top five, you can use the book to figure out what your strengths mean and how to put them to work.The book describes each strength, as well as the individuals that usually possess them. For many, reading this information is like looking into a mirror because it provides words to describe the actions and mindset that come naturally for them. For example, one of my strengths was learner, which in the book is described as, “The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning.” For me, nothing could be more true: I try to gather information constantly and learn as much as I can about everything around me. Knowing your strengths and learning how to implement them can be a personal catalyst for change at work.Now, Discover Your Strengths also dives into how to manage people regarding the 34 themes. It explains how to manage people with various strengths and suggests steps a manager can take to help that person succeed.It is vital to know who you are to advance within your career. It is even more important to ensure that you are spending your time working on items that coincide with your strengths. Now, Discover Your Strengths will help you realize your potential and drive realistic results within your career.ATD young professionals are encouraged to get involved and submit content to ATD blogs. Find more information about how you can share your content.

Discover Your Strengths

As we planned out our latest Talent Brief newsletter issue, we focused on what trends were gaining traction in the talent development field. Examining trends is a useful tool for reflection—they help us see what’s working and what’s not. This allows us to better plan for success in the future. But just because a topic is trendy doesn’t mean it’s changing talent development for the better. Some trends may do more harm than good, whether because they are misleading or because they were never actually evidence based.We reached out to experts in the field to weigh in on which trends they would like to see go away this year.Check out their replies below, and sign up for Talent Brief to get more insights like these in your inbox each week:What L&D trend from 2021 do you hope never makes a comeback, and why?“2021 was not ‘The Great Resignation.’ That’s an oversimplification. Opportunity finally caught up with disengagement. People seized the chance to reshape their relationships with work by going remote, changing jobs, or exploring new career paths. To avoid similar disruption in the future, organizations must adapt talent practices and accelerate internal skill development. L&D must shift stakeholder mindsets and make learning an ongoing part of every person’s job if companies hope to maintain capable workforces.”JD Dillon, Chief Learning Architect, Axonify“Personalization, in its current form. Yes, there are measurable results with AI-generated bespoke learning experiences. However, most employees would be surprised to know how much of their data is being collected without their knowledge and who has access to it. I firmly believe we need a GDPR when it comes to the triangulation of HR, performance, and L&D data for informed consent to opt-in to personalization.”Lori Niles-Hoffman, Senior Learning Strategist“In-person training being offered virtually exactly as it was delivered in-person. In 2020, there was a global mass movement to virtual learning. The pandemic forced things to be done quickly and cheaply to get learning up and running. The trend continued in 2021, and emergency virtual training, originally designed as live in-person training, still received no adjustments to ensure engaging and effective learning—resulting in bad learner experiences.”Myra Roldan, Senior Distributor of Knowledge and Good Vibes“I would love to see our industry doing less trend-chasing and more deciding what’s important for a particular learning & performance situation. It’s not “what can I do with mobile? AR? or video? Or microlearning? Or performance support or xAPI?” And more about how do I help this set of people accomplish this particular task in better ways? And I really do think that many of us are doing just fine with that.So much of what we have learned in the last two years now of living with a pandemic is that things change rapidly, we need to be flexible, and learning technology can be an enabler, annoying, and a barrier all at the same time.”Megan Torrance, Chief Energy Officer, Torrance Learning"As a result of protest, social unrest and political issues, organizations quickly reacted by implementing DEIB training courses without having a strategic approach that considered Culture, and other components - values, hiring, processes, etc. For organizations to truly implement meaningful change, they will need to replace reactive, “throw it together” methods with thoughtful, holistic DEIB strategies."Rita Bailey, Founder, Up to SomethingWhat trend would you like to see go away? Let us know in the comments below!

Return to Sender: Trends We’re Wishing Away in 2022

One of the unique products to emerge in an increasingly crowded field of social tools is Pinterest, a fun combination of social bookmarking, images, commenting, and public sharing.  It’s a great place for connecting with and sharing resources for your own professional development.But that doesn’t mean everyone is ready—or knows how—to use Pinterest. Here is some help.Lead them to waterI’ve been dealing with introducing new techs and tools for a long time now.  The best way I’ve found of encouraging acceptance and use is introducing a tool at the moment it will solve someone’s problem. A lot there depends on serendipity and hearing opportunity when it knocks. And one of the easiest ways to teach people to use (and like) a tool is to give them something fun to do with it.I’ve tricked (er, I mean led) lots of people to Pinterest by asking them to share photos of their favorite holiday decorations (even better if they tell a short story with it).  We’ve even developed a few Pinterest traditions, including the fabulous annual collaborative Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide . I hadn’t intended to do it this year, but demand from people on Twitter I don’t even know prompted me to again host the Thanksgiving Gallery of Hand Turkeys. Some 42 people contributed, from age 5 up, individually and as families, and some from other countries where they don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving. Is it silly? Sure. But it builds connection and community, and it is fun. More important, it helps people understand and use the tool. And when I ask some of them later to find and share an image they’d include on a virtual tour of their workplace, well, they’ll already know how to do that. Now, here are some ideas for L&D practitioners looking for ways to incorporate Pinterest into practice. Collaborative bookmarkingCheck out this collaborative board from Tracy Parish. She invited industry friends to pin their suggestions for good books about instructional design. Most include a comment from the pinner about why they chose it, and link directly to Amazon so they can be purchased.  Note the number of comments, including some from authors of the books pinned. Building a narrative/backchannel learningI recently attended the pilot of Mike Rohde’s new Sketchnote Workshop.  While I tweeted it, as usual, I realized the visual nature of it might be better suited to Pinterest.I began documenting my day and uploading photos and comments as we switched activities or shared what we were doing. It built a nice narrative of the day and offered a place for quick conversation.  This also supported backchannel learning for colleagues who were unable to attend the workshop. A friend, intrigued by the tweets, visited the Pinterest board and ended up sketchnoting the meeting she was in that day. She’s now bringing Mike in to deliver the workshop for the Atlanta ASTD chapter (February 11: check back on the chapter’s event page for details coming soon).Board: My Day at Mike Rohde’s Pilot of His New Sketchnote WorkshopVirtual field trips Offer tours of facilities to new hires; tours of your training center to first-time visitors; tours of a conference site. You can use these for recruiting to show potential hires how the workplace looks, such as pictures of areas where defibrillators are installed. You might include pictures of company extras; a friend who’s worked at a local big company for years didn’t know there was a meditation garden until I posted a photo of it.Overview of topic or area of interest and handout replacementAlthough I’ve been offering it in webinar format for years, my “Tips for the Positive Deviant” session suddenly caught fire last May. There was so much interest in it I finally set up a Pinterest board with highlights and key points from the session, additional resources with links for easy access, and a link to the ASTD webinar recording. This also serves as a much more robust takeaway than a copy of my slides or other usual event handout.Prework or snapshot of planned conversationAs one of the moderators of the weekly Twitter-based #lrnchat sessions, I often see the problem of having a chat catch someone’s eye after it’s underway. They want to join in, but they are coming into the conversation late, sometimes to a topic that’s a bit esoteric. Or—and I’m guilty too—they didn’t read an article we suggested for prereading. So, we’ve started using a Pinterest board to support some of these chats. Participants can check in quickly and get an overview of the topic—just the gist of it, sometimes, but enough to help them participate more fully. Here’s one we created to support a #lrnchat conversation focused on our own beliefs and metaphors about learning and teaching, and what those beliefs mean to one’s practice.Course resources and supportAssistant Professor Steven Bickmore uses Pinterests boards to create reading lists for each of his courses.  They’re easy to update, more enticing than a list of typed titles, and available for the rest of us to peruse.Encouraging reflectionI’ve reused the “metaphor” board described above as a reflective activity for students in instructional design and train-the-trainer sessions. They are asked to review it and then provide a verbal or written description of their own metaphors and how they are borne out in their own practice.Job aidsWhile I prefer Snapguide for preparing job aids these days, you could easily build a guide in Pinterest. Be sure to add images in reverse order.  As comments can alter layout and size, you might want to number them, too.  Post pictures of equipment repairs and workarounds. And remember: You don’t have to be the one doing all the pinning.Collaborative class activitiesHere are some ideas:Invite pinners to share images of customer service issues (like stained carpets and water cooler with no cups). Have a conversation about corporate culture based on pinned images of company furnishings and signage. Post pictures of the different ways a classroom can be set up, and ask participants in a train-the-trainer course to describe how each setup might affect interaction and social activities.Have learners share images of final projects.Did you have groups discuss an issue and create a flip chart report?  Post pictures of the charts.Host a Pinterest Appy Hour: Invite pinners to share their favorite new app from the past year; their favorite productivity app; their favorite photography app, their favorite app for travel, and so on.Have learners create a class book recapping activities and takeaways.Reaching other learnersOne of my historical concerns about many social tools is that so many of them are heavily text-based: blogs, microblogs, text chats, and so forth. In my world this can marginalize those with low-literacy skills or those with English as a second language.  We’re in a world in which the vast majority of our workforces own some kind of mobile phone or device—most of them with cameras.  The potential for user-generated images to support and include these workers is tremendous.Logistical tips and advice for using PinterestHere’s how Pinterest works:Pinterest is free. It is available on desktop or via a free mobile app.Pinterest allows you to pin images from a website and, from other Pinterest boards. You can also pin by uploading images from your own computer or mobile device.Pinterest boards are public to view; anyone can see them without an account.In order to create boards and pin to them, you need your own account.At this time, Pinterest doesn’t allow for moving pins around a board. To build a chronology—like a story from start to finish—you need to upload in order you want them to be viewed.You can set up “secret” boards to work on until you are ready to publish them. At this time only the board owner can work with the secret boards; they can’t be shared with other pinners.You need to issue invitations to other pinners. While some complain that Pinterest doesn’t offer users public boards on which everyone can pin, it also means that spammers can’t just pin on any board. It makes it a bit safer for those concerned about material inappropriate for some audiences.Sometimes for the sake of speed or including people who for whatever reason don’t have or want a Pinterest account, I just ask people to send me images and I upload them myself.

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