Coffee Club E4: Exploring the power of cohort based training

"I deeply love curiosity-driven learning. Go figure"

Eric Willeke

Rebecca leaves Eric and Mark unsupervised this week, and the conversation winds up revolving around Mark's highlight of the week, which is his excitement as he experiences the power of cohort-based training.

The exploration begins by comparing our mental models of what a training course is and the realization that although it's Mark's favorite new toy, Eric is no stranger to it. After a chat about how COVID forced us to learn to facilitate engaging virtual collaboration, we can't resist a trip down memory lane to reminisce on our early training experiences (a scary 30 years ago for Mark).

Moving on, we reflect on how often we jam too much information into people's heads in a multi-day course. Eric shares his love of the Kirkpatrick model for evaluating training effectiveness, which prompted a long discussion about the importance of making sure you're using the right training at the right time rather than just sprinkling it around.

A fun chat about the pros and cons of world-building to provide a useful 'created' context for training exercises versus using a series of exercises to establish a local 'in-house' context follows. After exploring the differentiation between a 'workshop which includes training' and 'experiential training,' we wrap up by chatting about some of the logistical trade-offs between multi-day and cohort-based.

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

References:

The Kirkpatrick training model