I think I'm lucky in this regard, because my entire job as an Innovation Facilitator centers on introducing new projects and technologies to educators, and I can think of quite a few experiences, especially in the beginning of my work with professional development, where technologies and ideas were met with resistance.
In terms of attitudes and behaviors, one of the things that struck me was the group's overall lack of interest in learning new things. Body language was often poor before sessions even started. They were also fairly quick to make negative comments when something would go wrong. For example, if a video wouldn't play, they were quick to make comments along the lines of, "See, this doesn't work. This stuff never works." It was an extraordinarily frustrating experience to walk in to, as apparently the behavior had become somewhat engrained in the group. Needless to say, our initial sessions were unproductive.
In the spring, however, we tried a completely different approach to the training and things went much better. In retrospect, I think we accidentally stumbled onto elements of the ARCS model, which led to the turnaround.
As Driscoll (2005) describes, the ARCS model consists of four elements that can enhance student motivation to learn: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. In our earlier trainings, I felt like we were working quite hard to get participants' attention, and that our presentations and activities were engaging and well organized.
Where we missed, however, was the RCS elements of the model. In particular, we did a poor job of bringing training sessions that were relevant to the participants' workday. Even when we created a custom training session on a topic of their request, we soon discovered that they either really didn't need that particular tool, or that they didn't have the fundamental skills down to be able to use that tool without backing up and learning other things first. Confidence was a huge issue for the group as well. We discovered later on that the group had some rather significant confidence issues with technology, and that the complaining that the technology wasn't working was often just an attempt to circumvent exposing that fact that they lacked the most basic skills. Lastly, there was very little to no satisfaction with anything that happened in the sessions.
What worked for us in the spring to completely change the effectiveness of the training sessions was to concentrate on learning the things they did as part of their workday. Once we had a better idea of what their day-to-day jobs entailed, we were better able to bring tools that were more relevant to their work lives. Secondly, we ran a very basic session that tried to address the confidence issues we'd seen in the fall, and it work very well. We brought out into the open the fact that it was okay if you didn't know how to do something with technology, that it's okay if something breaks when you try to use. We stressed that as trainers we often break things, get stuck, and don't know how to do things with technology. That's all okay. What's important, however, is that we move forward, one step at a time. This session did wonders to bolster the group's confidence and alleviate their fear of technology.
As we addressed these two issues, and ran more relevant sessions designed to build confidence, we found that satisfaction went way up. Participants' body language changed completely, and the results they achieved and the satisfaction they reported were night and day from the early fall.
References
Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.
Photo Credit:
Student sleeping: Gnurou, via Flickr, Creative Commons License
That is very frustrating to start a training session and have technical problems. One thing we have done as a district is to make sure that we do not have issues before a training and make sure any training we have it hands on and the teachers are creating something useful in their daily work.
ReplyDeleteHi Melissa, thanks for the comment, and thanks for the tips.
ReplyDeleteYes, part of the issue before was that many of the teachers were asked to bring their laptops, but the laptops were horribly out of date with software issues. They were running browers that were two years out of date, for example. So when you'd ask them to play a video on their computer, they couldn't do it. They also didn't have admin access to the laptops to be able to upgrade their software, which meant that we couldn't update the browser to fix the problem.
We've since addressed those issues, and things are much better in that regard now.