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Cure for the Common Classroom: Inside Out Learning Methodology
Ten Problems of Traditional Training:
1- Few participants. Employees do not want to attend training
2- Those who are forced to attend bring with them the attitude of a prisoner.
3- Worn-out, burnt-out training professionals with no passion for facilitating great learning.
4- Old, tired, and outdated content that does not resonate with participants
5- Irrelevant topics that do not help participants face real-world challenges.
6- Impersonal content disconnected from people’s needs and preferences.
7- Passive attendees with no opportunities to contribute or get involved.
8- Poor delivery that relies on ineffective methods such as one-way lecture type presentations.
9- The facilitator does not speak to the interest of the audience nor use the language of the audience.
10- Poorly designed, physically inhospitable facilities that are closer to being torture chambers than learning facilities.
The Result
Very little, if any, learning takes place, resulting in wasted time, efforts, and resources, costly missed opportunities, deprivation of people and organizations of critically needed competencies, and bad feelings on the part of all involved. It is a tragedy of multi-billion dollar proportions suffered by a good number of organizations throughout the USA and the world.
The Solution
A new kind of learning design, learning delivery, and learning environment.
Introducing:
Inside Out Learning (IOL) By HumaNext..
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IOL: A New Way to Design and Deliver Training
IOL means Inside Out Learning.
- IOL is a HumaNext learning design and delivery methodology that ensures that the event enjoys a number of built-in special design and delivery features that have proven to turn ordinary training sessions into extraordinary learning and changing experience.
- HumaNext is one of America’s most innovative training and communication companies, as evidenced by the depth and breadth of the cutting edge training programs we offer at our three main web sites.
- We have put the best lessons of our diversified training experience in the design of a unique approach to training that we call Inside Out Learnin, or IOL in short
- You can experience our powerful training methodology or by attending one of our training events. We have events described at the bottom of the page. You can also learn about it by reading below..
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From Instruction to Discovery
The field of designing training workshops is called “Instructional Design” which is based on the idea that the trainer will provide “instructions” (i.e. pre-made solutions or know-how) to participants as the way for them to learn.
Our “Inside-out Learning” approach calls for changing this mind-set so that when you design a learning workshop you focus on providing opportunities, activities, and ideas that enable participants to “discover” the learning points for themselves. Instead of engaging in “Instructional Design” you will engage in “Discovery Design.” Not only this is better, more impactful, and more interesting for participants, it is also all that for the facilitator as well.
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They Are Able to Perform, But Are They Willing?
Some training makes the mistake of offering knowledge and skills that focus on making participants more “able” to perform. That type of training forgets that people will perform only when they are both able and willing.
Our Inside-Out Learning Methodology shows you how to design and deliver content that adds to participants’ knowledge and skills while simultaneously stimulating their intrinsic desire to explore, learn, and grow.
Inside-Out Learning blends skills and inspiration in a way that touches the minds and hearts of participants. As a result, participants voluntarily build a commitment to the learning-performance process.
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Inside Out Learning Delivers the Following Assumptions and Principles
1- If It Doesn’t Touch the Inside, It Doesn't Change the Outside
One of the key assumptions of Inside Out Learning (IOL) is that if the new concepts you are learning do not touch you inside- in your mind, heart, and soul- you will not be able to truly absorb and adopt them to become your own and therefore use them to change things around you in the real world. Thus the IOL motto is: If it doesn’t touch the inside, it doesn't change the outside. We utilize our expertise in emotional intelligence training in the design and delivery of every IOL event. We understand that people are moved and changed by experience, not by theories or information.
Our IOL enables participants to live a different kind of experience in the training session, making the learning more meaningful and lasting.
Growing By Changing:
- The way humans develop and grow is by changing.
- Change is the essence of the human experience. There is no life without change.
- Our IOL delivers content, experiences, and insights that create deliberate change for participants as a way for personal development and professional growth.
- The change in outlook, attitude, and vision that participants experience helps them be more open to learning in general and creates in them a shift in how they approach tasks, people, and events at work.
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2- Learning-By-Teaching Approach
a. It has been proven that the best way to learn a subject is by teaching it.
b. IOL gives you the opportunity to learn each subject matter by teaching specially selected content.
c. And you will start the Learning-By-Teaching process right in the session.
d. You will receive supportive and constructive feedback from other participants.
The Learn-By-Teaching approach to training delivers many advantages to participants.
- It helps each participant present him/herself to others as both a learner and a teacher who has something useful and unique to offer. This has a tremendously positive effect on participants.
- It also helps bring a very rich diversity of view points and experiences into the materials being learned, as each participants bring his/her best ideas and experiences to integrate into the content being learned.
- In addition, the teaching gives people who have a limited teaching experience great confidence in their ability to teach others and in the value of their own experiences.
- Finally, this approach helps participants get to know each other on many levels, as learners, as teachers, and as supportive colleagues, and gradually as friends.
Here is how one participant in our 3-in-1 Certification said in this regard:
"I never shared with you how meaningful the New York experience was for me. Listening to you all and learning from you has changed the way I see the world, and helped me to build a vision far greater than I’d ever imagined. Thank you for generously sharing your stories and yourselves. It means more to me than you know.
- Holly McLemore, Training Manager
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Quick: What’s the Best Way to Learn Something?
As someone with many years in the business of training and learning, I remember hearing the phrase, “The best way to learn a topic is to teach it.” The first time I heard this I immediately liked it and believed it without demanding a proof of its validity. Every time I heard it after that I felt a mixture of recognition and wonderment. But then I started to ask myself, If this was really true, how come I don’t recall attending or reading about a single training program that applied this concept by having participants learn something by teaching it? May be the concept is not really true, I told myself. Or may be it is too difficult to put into practice. After all, how can we expect student to become teachers? How do we expect trainers to abdicate their responsibilities and just stand by watching as attendees learn the topic by teaching it themselves?
Finally I decided that it’s important to put the concept to the test. We conducted a small pilot program that indicated the possibility of success. Then we designed a more structured Learning-By-Teaching methodology and included it in our 3-in-1 Certification Program. We had participants teach carefully selected segments of our programs on Applying Emotional Intelligence at Work, and our Creativity At Work. The two subjects are certainly specialized and difficult enough, and are not of a generic nature or widely available and familiar like communication skills or leadership for example. So the attempt was quite challenging and involved a degree of risk. But I was teaching that risk-taking is an important part of creativity at work. So I decided to practice what I teach. We announced that our certification program will use a new Learning-By-Teaching approach and that participants will be asked to teach segments of the materials.
The success of the approach was beyond our expectations. Ten of the twelve attendees participated in teaching segments of the programs, and they added to it significant insights, experiences, and concepts. In the evaluation sheets at the end of the session, one participant wrote: Having guest facilitators is a GREAT idea. Great speakers – variety of voices, styles incorporating their experiences made it more interesting and applicable.
Another participant wrote: Learn by Teaching every effective. Watching each other teach makes us see what works and what doesn’t. And another wrote: At first I was skeptical about the Learn-By-Teaching approach, but loved multiple presentations!
The great success of the Learning-By-Teaching approach has prompted us to spend more time refining it and integrating it more smoothly as one of the key concepts of our new Inside-Out Learning (IOL) methodology of training.
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3- Our Words Create Our World: A New Language at Work
A key IOL assumption is that the language we use to talk to ourselves and others creates our reality. In our workshops, we introduce a new "language" that helps people collaborate and achieve results.
The IOL experience pays a special attention to the language used by participants, and helps them discover how it impacts their ability to work with others. Through real-life exercises, processes and inquiry into the nature of communication, participants discover previously-unexamined relationships between language and action. They are introduced to a structure of communication that enables them to inspire collaboration and evoke action.
By introducing participants to a new way of expressing themselves, giving directions and feedback, and positively influencing others, they find it easier to get their thoughts and feelings across, build strong bonds and achieve breakthrough results.
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The Little Boy and the Empty Bucket: Using Stories to Teach
In our Inside-Out Learning methodology, we use a lot of stories, and we show participants how to use stories in their training. Using stories is one of the best ways to bring a point home and facilitate learning. That’s why all great teachers throughout history have used stories to make their points. The parables used by Jesus Christ are perhaps among the most famous.
The best stories to use are those you find in everyday encounters. The ones you experience while going about your work, interacting with colleagues, talking in meetings, or playing with children.
Here is a story shared by Josh McCormack, Sr. Project Manager, Publicis Dialog.
"I was the other day at the playground with my 3 year old daughter.
There were big sprinklers that sprayed out water. Kids liked to go up to them, put their hand over the jet of water and fill buckets. To do so and not get totally soaked, you have to move quickly, put your hand firmly over the jet at a certain angle and shoot the water into your bucket.
One little boy wanted to fill his bucket, but couldn't get himself to get through the spray, approaching, pausing, backing up and trying again, but never moving in enough. He got wetter than others who had filled their buckets, without getting anything in his.
I realize what I took away from this was pretty cheesy, but I felt like his behavior was a metaphor for our willingness to push into an uncomfortable situation. If you hesitate you'll get nothing, but will get wet. If you push through you may still get nothing and may get wet, but at least you had the chance to get something in your bucket."
As you prepare to train or teach, ask yourself, which of the stories that happened to me can I bring to the session to make a point? People relate more to real life stories that happened to people like them than to concepts or ideas, no matter how great. If you want to touch the hearts of your students, tell a story.
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4. A Team-Learning Approach
The Brain Develops Better In Concert With Others
- IOL leverages the powerful human need for belonging, socializing, and community.
- In IOL, we spend a significant amount of time developing the capacity of participants to think, behave, and learn as a team right in the training session.
- Participants get to know each other on a much deeper level than possible in traditional training.
- This has a huge impact on the ability of participants to learn together in a much more supportive learning environment.
- This phenomenon accelerates learning during the sessions and creates a more lasting impact, connections, and cherished experienced afterward.
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5. A Blended Learning Approach
- Each IOL event offers a blended learning approach to training.
- Blending learning is emerging as the most effective and preferred method of developing people at work. It is based on the recognition that it takes more than one workshop to effect lasting change in people’s thinking and behavior.
- It offers a blended package of learning opportunities, tools, and programs to help learners continue to develop over several weeks and months of continuous learning. It uses various media to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and the application of skills.
- The IOL event by HumaNext gives you and your internal or external clients a variety of learning media, vehicles, assessment tools, and follow-up courses.
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6. IOL Powerful Assumptions Produce Uncommon Results:
Here Is Why Our IOL Is Different and Effective
IOL (Inside Out Learning) delivers contents that are based on a set of powerful assumptions. The assumptions you hold about yourself, your work, your colleagues, and your organization will shape the way you live, work, collaborate, and accomplish. It's the same thing with designing our training workshops.
In IOL you will experience a different kind of training that produces real-world results based on the following set of fundamental assumptions:
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What people focus on becomes their reality: We invite people to shift their focus from the problems they want to fix to the bigger picture of the exciting future they want to create for themselves and the organization
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Taking the Best of the Past to the Future: The most confident way for people to move to the future is to carry forward the best parts of the past. We help people identify what works best for them and take it forward to create larger accomplishments.
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Change Starts With The Individual: We invite participants to adopt Gandhi's principle, "We must become the change we want to see in the world." We believe that people are capable of change once they choose it themselves. Our work helps participants access the source of motivation for change. Our structured activities provide them with insight into their own patterns of thinking and acting, and guides them in stepping outside the box of self-limiting beliefs. They venture with enthusiasm to experience change and accomplish results that were previously perceived to be unattainable.
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Erring on the Side of Hope: We hold the belief, supported by research, that the state of being hopeful is one of the key marks of emotional intelligence and effective performance. As specialists who help organizations create positive workplaces where people say, Thank God It’s Monday, we are positive by nature. Our work creates optimism and positive expectations for participants, and helps them adopt similar attitude themselves.
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Commitment to Action Is Self-Generated: One of our key assumptions is that everybody wants to do good work that brings them self-satisfaction and the recognition and appreciation of others. Participants learn how to build upon this to inspire a desire for action and achievement in themselves and others. Because this desire is self-generated, it produces much better results than external incentives and rewards.
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7. We Put The Power of Ideas in the Hands of Participants
In our IOL experiences, participants are introduced to powerful ideas that stimulate new ways of viewing familiar patterns.
- Participants work together to apply these ideas and test their skills in new ways of thinking and working.
- Participants leave the sessions with a new sense of their ability to influence people and make a significant impact on the organization.
- The influence of powerful ideas is felt profoundly throughout our training modules.
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8- IOL Uses Assessment and Profiling Tools for Deeper Awareness and Insights
- IOL experiences include the use of one or more personality / competency profiling tools and assessments. These tools may include our Inside-Out Personal Profile, emotional intelligence profiles, creativity profiles, communication profiles, and team profiles.
- Participants not only use these tools to understand themselves, but they also learn how to administer and interpret these tools for others.
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9- Step Outside the Box: IOL Puts Creativity In the Training
IOL Is Designed To Be A Most Creative Training Experience
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10- There Are No Ordinary People
In the IOL, we design the content and deliver the experience on the assumption that there are no ordinary people. We believe that each person has the potential to achieve extraordinary accomplishments and is only waiting for the opportunity and condition that makes this possible. The objective of learning is to show people the way to create such opportunities for themselves.
One of the ways we achieve this in IOL is by giving total attention and deep interest in each participant as a unique individual. We devote ample time, and create special activities, to enable the facilitator to know each person, and enable other participants to get to know each other, so that each participant feels he or she is listened to, is appreciated, and is understood.
This intense interest in people creates a different relationship dynamic in the learning session, leading to the kind of comments we receive from participants even several months after the training. This in turn creates the condition necessary for people to feel confident about their ability to contribute, and then actually turn this gained confidence into extraordinary accomplishments.
One of the amazing discoveries some people are fortunate to make at one point of their lives is that achieving extraordinary things does not depend on how much resources you have but on how much you believe in your ability to achieve. This self confidence, accompanied by optimism, are key aspects of the emotional intelligence that people need to take the initiative toward achieving great things. This is the kind of discoveries our IOL experiences make possible for participants.
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What Participants Said About Our Training Events Using Inside-out Learning
I definitely felt as though I was taking part in something very special during the last three days
I left the training inspired and energized, and looking forward to using the tools. I appreciate each and every one of you and thank you for making the training so impactful for me. - Amy Jaffe Barzac, Co-founder, Boundless Playgrounds.
To my fellow 3-in-1 explorers: Thank you for making this learning voyage both productive and pleasant. I could not have chosen better partners in this experience. I have begun to consider the challenge, and opportunity the training presents in my personal life, administrative roles, and consulting practice. - George Roets, Director, Public Health Services, Watkins Glen, New York.
You were all so impressive and inspiring, and the materials so interesting – I definitely felt as though I was taking part in something very special during the last three days. Thank you for sharing your spirits so freely! - Your Admiring Alumnus, Resourceful Rick Richard Hammett, Full Time Doctoral Student & Graduate Assistant, Texas A&M University.)
Francois, Thank you so much for the wonderful class is New York, which I will never forget. It was one of the most rewarding classes that I have taken. I look forward to collaborations with the great people I met at the class and a rewarding relationship with HumanNext. - Bobbi Ball, Executive Director, Partners in Community Building, Chicago.
Francois, ...really really thanks for the wonderful experience we've had in our last seminar. Ging Igual, Part time consultant of Mercer Human Resource Consulting, Philippines
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Experience IOL as Part of HumaNext Trainer Certification
The best way to experience the power of IOL and learn more about this type of powerful learning is to get certified by HumaNext:
http://www.humanext.com/humanext-seminars.html
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IOL Is Designed and Delivered By Francois Basili, President of HumaNext
Our IOL experiences are led and facilitated by Francois Basili, CEO of HumaNext / Communication Ideas, and editor of TGIM newsletter, who developed a large number of training programs and learning events attended by thousands of professionals in the US and abroad.
Basili has more than twenty years experience as a corporate training/ HRD and communication executive and consultant. He led a number of major cultural transformations for organizations in the US and abroad. He led workshops attended by executives from American, European, and Asian corporations.
Basili's workshops helped to dramatically change participants' performance at some of the toughest work cultures in the world, such as Bechtel's projects in Saudi Arabia, and a correction facility (jail) system in New York. He presented at such national and international conferences like the Strategic Research Institute's conference in New York, and has given interviews to several national publications on critical workplace issues.
Basili's corporate experience included heading the training/HRD and communication departments for a $1.2 billion, 12000 employee healthcare organization in New York. Basili's writings on communication and training topics appeared in publications in the US and abroad. He is the editor of TGIM newsletter read by thousands of training and communication professionals around the world. He holds a B.S. in Engineering, and a Masters in Public Administration from New York University.
What People Said About Basili's Workshops:
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Illuminating and new. Excellent workshop.
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Opens up new thinking and not accepting status quo.
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Extremely interesting. Would like to pursue further. Excellent.
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Brought out areas of applications that people would normally overlook.
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Basili got people involved – made them think – gave them a different perspective on different approaches. Enlightening.
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Very informative. Group interactions were most illuminating and fun
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Creating Emotional Engagement
Whether working on an employee engagement initiative, or a leadership development program, it’s not enough that you design, present, communicate, and deliver your content in a logically convincing manner. To ensure success, you must also engage people emotionally. This is the lesson learned from many training programs, employee communication processes, and culture change efforts.
A July 30, 2007 article in Chief Learning Officer magazine refers to the findings by the global consulting and training firm BlessingWhite that one of the reasons leadership development programs fail is the lack of emotional engagement of participants.
The article says that one of the key reasons why leadership development programs fail is that participants fail to engage emotionally. They might agree with what they learned in the corporate leadership development program, but if participants do not walk away with a burning desire to implement anything — or they simply do not care enough to put forth the effort to try something new — the program has not succeeded.
So how can you engage participants emotionally? This is one of the key questions we set to address in designing our “Inside-Out Learning” methodology. We express this in the first principle of Inside-Out Learning which says: If It Doesn’t Touch the Inside, It Doesn't Change the Outside. Read about it below.
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Nothing lowers the level of conversation more than raising the voice
A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.” – Chinese Proverb
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Introducing Yourself with a Song
Carol Hovey, one of the participants in last year's HumaNext 2007 event in New Jersey, introduced herself by singing in a dramatic voice the words: “Who Am I?” She sang the “I” with a high note that reverberated throughout the training facility and sent a message of excited anticipation to all attendees. Carol did this in response to my request of participants to prepare a 3 minute creative introduction of themselves to the group. After all, the event was about creativity, communication, diversity, and emotional intelligence.
The 3 minute presentation was a small part of what attendees were asked to do. They were also asked to collaborate, before arriving, on preparing and presenting portions of the workshops. This is part of the Learning-By-Teaching / Inside-Out-Learning methodology we use at HumaNext. Each learner becomes a teacher too. Each participant becomes a presenter. It provides learners with an active role to play in the learning process. It makes learning more diversified, more collaborative, and embracing of “user-generated content.” Attendees didn’t just present the content we provided them, but brought their own experiences, stories, and learning tools with them. The photo shows one of the many activities that took place in HumaNext 2007
You might want to ask attendees of your next training session or team meeting to prepare a short presentation on the subject of the meeting. This makes them part-owners of the meeting. It adds to the level of involvement and ownership. It makes the meeting’s objectives easier to achieve.
Register to receive our HumaNext Newsletter with ideas for the human side of the organization.
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