On Learning technique

Over the past few months, we have been trying out some learning techniques. One of these is 'eliciting' learnings from the audience.

Earlier, the courses we created (and I refer to Instructor Led sessions) were 'fact heavy' where the instructor taught on dos and donts, tips, rules and a lot of other gyan. Pure gyan based sessions are one way downloads and the people go back sleepwalking.

Over time we tried to change it into a mode where the learning happens based on peer interaction, eliciting learning using various activities or other modes of learning.Pure elicting sessions tend to give the impression to the audience that the facilitator did not add value.

So what we realised that there needs to be a balance between the two. People tend to not like something that is heavily laden on the former nor on the latter. What is that balance - I dont know, but there is some balance here that I think will get to a point where the audience goes back happy. And those are thoughts for another day - on how to get there - as we get a grip on the problem.

Activities - if you use the same activities again and again - the learning is lost - so any activity that is embedded has to be unique and fairly non-repeatable and even contextual if possible. But that is hard work for the trainer - which is why people tend to fall back on the same insipid activities for everything. 

Takeaways dont work - definitely not hard cards are filed away so deep that nobody can reach them in reality leave alone from memory. 

But what can the learner carry as a both a physical and a mental takeaway from the session? And how to make it stick? We think there is an answer in there somewhere...