Shared Learning LOLAs help participants learn from each other and with each other. These LOLAs typically create a format for sharing, organizing, and evaluating the participants’ experiences, best practices, knowledge, and opinions.
Why Conduct Shared Learning LOLAs?
Most people know that adult learners bring a wealth of experience and expertise to the training sessions; unfortunately, however, most trainers treat adult participants like naïve children in grown-up bodies. How wonderful it would be if these trainers became facilitators and tapped into the learning resources stored inside adult brains. How effective it will be if online facilitators required and rewarded the sharing of best practices among adult participants.
Shared learning LOLAs encourage mutual learning among the participants. Instead of an expert lecturing to them, the facilitator asks a series of questions and specifies a series of tasks that require and reward the adult participants to reflect on the training topic, reach back into their experiences, and share their experiences and expertise with each other. This type of mutual learning strengthens the ties among the participants and between the participants and the facilitator.
The facilitator’s role is to reinforce appropriate ideas and to gently correct inappropriate ones.
Examples
Here are several examples of shared learning LOLAs:
1. Always and Never. Announce an important workplace role (such as a meeting manager). Ask the participants to work independently and prepare a list of sentences about what an effective person in this role always does and why they do it. Give an example such as an effective meeting manager always concludes the meeting on time because it emphasizes the importance of punctuality. After a suitable time, ask the participants to prepare another list of sentences about that an effective meeting manager never does and why they avoid doing it. Again, give an example such as an effective meeting manager never invites too many participants because it makes the discussions difficult. After some time, assemble two to five teams, each with two to five participants. Send the teams to separate breakout rooms and ask the participants to prepare a checklist of Dos and Don’ts for effective meeting management. Bring the teams back to main room to present and discuss their checklists.
2. Appreciative Encounters. Specify a work-related activity (such as coaching). Ask the participants to spend 3 minutes to come up with a real or imaginary story of a successful application of the activity. After 3 minutes, ask the participants to open their mics and take turns to share their success stories. When this story-sharing activity is completed, send teams of 3 to 5 participants to separate breakout rooms. Invite the teams to analyze the stories, identify success factors, and create a checklist for successful application of the activity.
3. Best Answers. Ask an open-ended question related to the training topic (such as How can a salesperson gain trust from a skeptical customer?). Ask each person to write an answer on a piece of paper. After suitable time, assemble two to five teams, each with two to five participants. Send the teams to separate breakout rooms. Ask the team members to share their answers and select the best answer. Bring the teams back to the main room to share their best answers. Finally, ask each participant to individually select the best of the best answers.
4. Concept Analysis. Identify an important concept related to the training topic (such as equality). Ask a series of questions about a concept (such as what the critical characteristics of this concept are, what are synonyms of the label for the concept, and what is a clear example of this concept). After listening to the participants’ responses, comment on them, correct any misconceptions, and provide additional information.
5. Crisis Management Triads. Announce a training topic (such as resilience) and describe a roleplay scenario. Ask the participants to independently write scenarios (depicting a situation that requires resilience). Give an example (such as a team member getting killed in an act of workplace violence). After suitable time, send groups of three participants each to a separate breakout room. Ask one of the participants to share their roleplay scenario. Ask the other two participants to take turns to act out the primary role. Debrief by discussing how the two different role-players embedded resilient behavior in the way they acted out the primary role.
6. Flip. Select a training topic (such as giving feedback) and come up with a brainstorming prompt that requires undesirable outcomes (such as feedback that produces negative reactions). Invite the participants to generate several brainstormed ideas. Take one of these ideas and demonstrate how you could flip it around to produce a strategy for achieving desirable outcomes. Select another negative idea and ask the participants to type flipped ideas in the chat area. Work with the participants to select one positive idea that is like to produce effective results.
7. Four by Four. Ask four open-ended questions that ask for the participants’ opinions, perceptions, or experiences. Set up four breakout rooms each with a whiteboard that displays one of the four questions. Organize the participants into four teams and send each of them to a different breakout room to list of alternative answers to the question on the whiteboard. After 3 minutes, rotate the teams to the next breakout room to add more answers to the question in that room. Repeat the procedure one more time. During the next (final) round, ask the teams to select the four best answers written previously by the other teams.
8. Group Scoop. Specify a topic (such as business meetings). Ask the participants to independently write a list of facts, perceptions, opinions, rumors, and suggestions related to this topic. Organize four or five equal-sized teams and send them to different breakout rooms. Ask the team members to share their lists and add at least five more items. Invite the team members to select the top four items among all their lists and create a graphic poster on the whiteboard to describe these four items. Bring everyone back to the main room and invite different teams to share their whiteboard posters and discuss the important items.
9. Growing List. Identify a training goal (such as increasing the number of sales). Set up a web page and invite the participants to type suitable strategies for achieving the goal on this page. Explain that the target is to type 101 unique strategies. Limit the participants to five different strategies a day. Encourage the participants to read the tips typed by others. At the beginning of each day identify the top two best strategies typed on the day before. Continue the activity until the list contains 101 strategies.
10. Individual, Partner, or Team. Choose a training topic (such as teamwork) and ask the participants to individually write a story about it in the next 3 minutes. At the end of this time, ask the participants to stop writing even if their story is not finished. Select another training topic. Send pairs of participants to breakout rooms to collaboratively write a story in the next 3 minutes. After 3 minutes, ask the partners to stop writing the story. Select a different topic and organize the participants into teams of 3 to 5 members each. Send each team to separate breakout rooms and have them jointly write a story on the topic. At the end of 3 minutes, bring everyone back to the main room and conduct a debriefing discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of working in different sized groups.
11. Matched and Mixed. Identify four employee groups (such as older employees, new hires, women, and minority members). Divide the participants into four equal-sized teams representing each of these groups and send each team to a separate breakout room. Ask each team to generate five policy suggestions for ensuring positive working relationship among the groups. During the next round, organize the participants into four mixed groups and have them select and modify the different policy suggestions. Bring all groups to the main room to present their final choices and to justify them.
12. Mutual Memories. Identify an important (and lengthy) activity undertaken by the work group (such as managing a major change initiative). Send groups of participants to different breakout rooms. Ask members of each group to take turns to recall and share a memory related to the activity. Request the other participants to talk about this memory. Continue sharing of memories have exhausted their recollections. Bring all groups to the main room conduct an open-ended discussion of what happened in the activity and what is likely to happen in the future.
13. Quick Scan. Display and announce four open questions related to the training topic. These questions should require alternative perceptions or opinions as responses. Organize the participants to four teams, assign one of the questions to each team, and send the teams to separate breakout rooms. Invite the team members to generate alternative responses to the question assigned to them. Bring the teams back to the main room and ask each team to share the collection of alternative responses. Request members of the three other teams to contribute additional alternative responses.
14. Situation Cards. Announce a workplace event (such as downsizing) and ask each participant to write several single sentence scenarios related to this event. Assign groups of participants to different breakout rooms. Ask one of the participants to present their scenario and the other participants to write a brief description of how they would handle the situation. Ask the person who presented the scenario to collect the responses, mix them up, and read the best response. Conduct several more rounds to permit all group members to present their scenarios.
15. Start, Stop, and Sustain. Set up three breakout rooms each with a whiteboard with one of these headings: Start, Stop, or Sustain. Specify a frequent workplace activity (such as project management) and ask the participants to independently think of a list of steps typically involved in this activity. Organize the participants into three teams and send them to different breakout rooms. Depending on the heading on the whiteboard, ask the team members to list appropriate steps to be started being used in the activity, steps to be stopped being used in the activity, and steps to be continued and sustained being used in the activity. After suitable time, rotate the teams to that next breakout room to study the list of steps on the whiteboard and add additional items. Conduct one more rotation of the teams and ask the participants to select the four most important steps to be started, stopped, or sustained.
16. Sudden Roleplay. Present a scenario about an international encounter. Example: A foreign participant wandering around the meeting rooms at a professional conference, looking confused. Explain that you are going to play the role of a foreigner and ask for a volunteer to spontaneously play the role of a sensitive local person. Focus on you and the volunteer and conduct the roleplay. Stop abruptly and restart the roleplay with same volunteer. Repeat several rounds of the same roleplay with the same participant and later other participants. Conduct a debriefing discussion to brainstorm guidelines for improving intercultural encounters.
17. Surprising Sentence. Work with small groups of participants, each group in a separate breakout room. Explain the challenge to create the longest possible sentence by taking turns to supply two or three words to construct a meaningful, lengthy, compound-complex sentence. Invite a volunteer to supply the first set of two words. Request contributions from the other participants until you have spent 5 minutes. Debrief by identifying factors that contribute to true collaboration.
18. Take Five Habits. Send teams of 3 to 5 participants to separate breakout rooms. Ask each team to generate a list of habits of effective facilitators. Bring the teams to the main room and prepare a common list of 10 effective characteristics by asking the teams to contribute one item at a time. Ask the teams to select the most important characteristic. Identify this characteristic as “1” and ask the teams to select the second most important characteristic. Continue this procedure until you have identified the top five characteristics of effective facilitators.
19. Top Tips. Ask a “how-to” question (such as How do we handle participants who whisper to each other during a group discussion?) and ask each participant to come up with several suitable tips. Request each participant to select the best tip. Send pairs of participants to different breakout rooms and ask them to share their tips. Reassemble the participants into teams of four people and send each team to a breakout room. Ask each participant to share the response they heard from their partner during the previous breakout room meeting. Recall all participants to the main room and ask volunteers to share the best tip they heard.
20. Utopia and Dystopia. Divide the participants into two teams and send them to separate breakout rooms. Give one of the teams an optimistic headline from the future (that identify sensational success) and the other team a pessimistic headline (that identify an epic failure). Ask the teams to prepare fictional timelines that link the current state of the organization to the future headline. Bring all participants back to the main room to review the alternative timelines and come up with plans to ensure the optimistic future and to prevent the pessimistic one.
21. Visual Analysis. Announce a training topic (such as diversity). Ask each participant to independently draw a graphic on a piece of paper to depict the topic. After a suitable pause, ask a random participant to silently hold up their graphic to the camera. Request the other participants to open their mics and say a key characteristic of the topic as captured in the graphic. After a suitable time, invite the person who drew the graphic to explain what they meant to convey. Continue with the display and discussion of other graphics.
22. World’s Worst. Specify an important role related to the training topic (such as a financial-service provider). Present a job-related situation (such as a customer claiming not to have time) and ask a volunteer to demonstrate how the world’s worst financial service provider would respond to this situation. If necessary, demonstrate inappropriate and insensitive behaviors (such as responding with let's not waste time. How about signing this order form right now?). Invite several volunteers to improvise increasingly obnoxious behaviors. After people have run out of steam, describe another job-related situation, and continue with improvised responses. After several repetitions, conduct a debriefing discussion to brainstorm a list of dos and don’ts based on the earlier portrayals.