Switch the focus!

From one voice…
Too often in meetings, classrooms, and workshops, the main voice we hear is that of the trainer, teacher, or expert. Apart from a few questions at the end of the lecture, the participants are sitting and listening passively, in some cases taking notes or squinting at slides on the screen, or perhaps dreaming about something else altogether. But are they learning? And more importantly, will they remember what they learned?

…to many…
Most people who work with adult learners know that the best way to generate energy is to invite discussion and participation. Thus, we have seen a proliferation of case studies, simulation games, energizers, and other techniques in many learning events. Sometimes this participation is helpful in drawing out people's own experiences, but if done poorly, no one is clear on whether the learning objectives have been accomplished. And how effective are these techniques when the participants need to learn new knowledge, skills or attitudes?

…to the sound of learning.
Global Learning Partners creates through dialogue education a middle ground where participation creates engagement and learning that is accountable to everyone's needs.

Dialogue Education provides a safe, structured, and accountable framework for designing and facilitating learning events. It switches the focus from what the instructor says about a topic to what the participants do with the content to demonstrate their learning. It takes advantage of the fact that adult learners are professionals and decision makers in their learning process while providing enough rigor in the design so that everyone can clearly evaluate what they have learned.

Dialogue Education synthesizes the key insights of adult learning theory into a series of principles and practices that can help everyone become a better teacher or trainer. It starts with the principles that make for effective adult learning, including:

	conducting a learning needs and resources assessment to inform the workshop design;
	ensuring safety in the environment and the process for all the learners;
	paying careful attention to the sequence of content and reinforcement of learning;
	designing to help learners learn through praxis: action by reflection or learning by doing;
	respecting the learners as subjects of their own learning;
	teaching towards the cognitive (ideas), affective (feelings) and psychomotor (actions) domains;
	ensuring the immediacy of the learning for the participants;
	using teamwork and small groups to promote interaction, discussion and dialogue;
	designing and teaching so that the learners are engaged in what they are learning; and,
	holding the instructor accountable to the learners, the learners accountable to the instructor, and to themselves.

Jane Vella was not the first person to identify these principles -- Freire, Knowles and others wrote about them decades ago and many of us have tried to incorporate them into our own teaching - but we believe that Jane's unique contribution has been to synthesize these ideas into a framework of practices that can help an instructor translate these ideas into action and results. Some of the practices include:

	using the Steps of Design to structure a learning event so that the needs of the learners frame the other design choices (i.e., rationale, time, location, content, ABOs, methods);
	structuring each design as a series of Learning Tasks that guide how the participants will engage with the content by reflecting on their own experience, considering the new content, applying it immediately, and considering the relevance of what they have just learned for their own situation;
	setting Achievement-Based Objectives (ABOs) that describe what the learners will have done with each content element according to Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive learning (e.g. solved, categorized, diagrammed, developed, evaluated) in observable and verifiable terms;
	teaching to different learning styles (visual, auditory or kinaesthetic), learning domains (cognitive, affective or psychomotor) and multiple intelligences;
	practicing the art of weaving, waiting and affirming in facilitating to create an atmosphere of respect, and safety; and,
	incorporating warm-ups, safe feedback, synthesis and evaluation tasks in the learning design.