Forget Courses, Webinars and Workshops. Create a ‘Learning Experience’ Instead.

Why you should create a learning experience

Maybe you’ve created and taught dozens of courses, or maybe you haven’t given your first workshop yet.  I’m going to tell you why you need to start thinking about “teaching” differently if you want to wow your students, deliver the transformation you promised them, and make them raving fans.

There are a lot of teaching strategies out there – good ones, too!  In fact, I post a new article about one every week on youshouldteach.com. But,

The best strategy for getting your message across is to stop focusing on presenting information, and start focusing on allowing your students to learn.

If you’re thinking, “Uh, Kirstin, aren’t those the same thing?”  I’m going to try to convince you that they’re not even close to being the same. Creating a learning experience means that you are not just telling your students what to think, you are guiding them through the work to understand, process and internalize the key concepts they need.  You are helping them achieve the transformation they wanted when they decided to listen to what you had to say.

The teaching-learning bargain

As an adult, when you take a class, or participate in a workshop or a webinar, why do you do it? Is it so you can sit around and listen to the teacher speak?  No! It is because you believe the teacher is going to help you solve a problem that you want to solve. Maybe you need to learn how to use a new software tool that will help you make more sales for your business. Or maybe you want to form new exercise habits that will allow you to lose the weight you’ve always wanted to lose.

The real reason we fork out our time and money to take a class is because after the class we believe we will know something new that’s important to us, be able to do something we couldn’t do before, or feel differently about something we care about. We hand over our money and go to the class because we believe that THIS teacher is going to deliver on the promise to solve our problem and change us for the better. That they will deliver the transformation we are looking for.

That, my friends, is the real job of a great teacher.  Not telling students everything we know.  Not simply showing them how to do something, and certainly not telling them how they should feel.  Our job is to help them transform themselves for the better.

But that’s just one side of the teaching-learning bargain.  If we are going to provide one or all of these three transformation opportunities to our students, what do we need them to do to actually achieve change? The student simply cannot just sit passively in a chair if they want to achieve a transformation, they have to do some work. 

A really great teacher’s job is to give students the right information, work and inspiration so that they can transform themselves.

When a teacher does this, they are not just delivering a course, webinar or workshop to their students. They are fulfilling their part of the teaching-learning bargain and delivering a learning experience.

Old-school education versus transformation

So what does that mean to you, the teacher or presenter?  How can you design and deliver a meaningful learning experience that will give your students an opportunity to achieve the transformation they are looking for?  This is where understanding great teaching strategies comes in.

There is a lot of research out there about how human brains work, and how we learn. A good teacher understands and uses strategies that allow their students to understand, process and internalize the concepts they need to make the change. 

I’m not going to go into all of those strategies right now, but let me give you some examples of strategies that help students achieve transformation, and show you how they contrast with “old-school” ideas of education (pun intended).

Old-school: you “cover” material using slides with bullet points related to your topic, or you “go over” the material in a series of video lectures if it’s an online class.

Transformation: you present only the key ideas in a simple structure designed to make it easy for students to absorb, process and internalize the concepts.

Old-school: most of the course time is spent on lecture-style presentation by the teacher.

Transformation: most of the course time is spent on student activities, discussion and opportunities to check knowledge (like quizzes).

Old-school: the teacher is ultimately responsible for making students learn.

Transformation: the students are ultimately responsible for their own learning, which makes the value much higher to them.

I hope you’re starting to see the possibilities for how designing a learning experience can completely change the effectiveness and success of your teaching. But let’s take it a step further and spell out why this method is really so much better.

What’s in it for your students?

There are a lot of reasons people create courses, webinars and workshops, but hopefully in the end our goal is to serve and benefit our students. So how does creating a learning experience ultimately serve our students?

When you deliver a learning experience, your students will be:

• Super engaged in class because they are participating and actively learning.
• Able to complete the class because they are engaged and literally can’t wait to find out what’s next!
• Internalizing the key points of the  message you are teaching, so they will be able to remember those concepts and apply them in their own lives.
• Having more fun! Life is too short to spend our time trudging through boring classes to get the information we need.

If, at the end of our learning experience, students have internalized what they need to transform their lives, remember what they learned, and had a wonderful time, we teachers can rest assured that it was a job well done.

What’s in it for you?

Ok, so we are serving our students and allowing them to achieve the transformation they need. But let’s talk about why that is great for you, the teacher, too!

When you deliver a learning experience, you will be:

• Having a lot more fun teaching.  In the same way that it is way more fun to learn when a class is designed this way, it is also much more fun to teach!
• Learning and developing your own skills, because when you give your students a voice, they will also become teachers.  They will teach each other and they will teach you.
• Finally, when you deliver a transformative and entertaining learning experience, your students are going to become raving fans who will gladly tell their friends how awesome your class is!

How to transition to a learning experience

I hope I’ve convinced you that you should throw out your old ideas about how to create courses, webinars and workshops, and start delivering learning experiences instead. But how are you going to do that?  Do you need to throw out all of your old material and start from scratch?  Of course not!  You are an expert in your field and you know what your students need to learn.

Also, you don’t really have to forget about courses, webinars and workshops, these are all great ways to deliver learning experiences. You just need to learn how to design them using sound teaching and learning strategies. So the first step is to start learning about teaching and learning strategies! Head over to my website:

youshouldteach.com

For new articles every week that concisely introduce strategies, explain why they work, and give plenty of examples of how to work them into your materials  whether you are designing a live presentation or an online class.  I know you don’t have time to read a 40-page research paper every week, so I’m going to boil it down for you so you can get what you need and apply it right away to the learning experiences you are creating!

Thanks for reading. If there’s something particular you’d like to learn about in the coming weeks, please leave a comment below and let me know.  I’d love to answer your question in a future post!

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