Can you flip your classroom and turn 60 minutes into 30?

In the current climate everyone is stretched and being asked to do more with less. Less resources can make it very difficult to deliver effective training to your teams, however a well trained team can drive up productivity and drive down costs.

It is key that HR and training teams can engage their staff with training programs that ensure everyone is compliant and confident in their abilities.

Understanding how your team learn will mean that you can deliver more effective training and shorten the training cycle. There are two main stages to learning new information:

Acquisition – finding and understanding new information

Application – applying this information to your working life

Developing both parts is key to delivering effective training. The traditional “lecture” model often focuses too much on the “Acquisition” neglecting the “Application” of knowledge. Senior management consultants help transform companies by nurturing both aspects of learning in the teams they train – to ensure as well as knowing the theory, managers understand how to put these things into practice.

Internal training teams don’t always have the luxury of training staff for long sessions, or even away days, where staff can focus and develop their knowledge. Training often has to be fitted in around other duties, and getting an hour is a luxury.

As time is a limited resource you need to make sure you’re getting as much as you can out of your staff in these sessions. This is where the idea of the “flipped classroom” comes in.

“Flipping the classroom” is a concept that has been gaining traction in education circles over the last few years. This is a model is where knowledge acquisition is done as the “homework” and the application is the focus of the lesson.

In a workplace setting, this breaks down to having “pre-reading” before a learner is ready for a training session. This could as the name suggests be reading, but could also involve watching a video, or listening to something like a podcast. It could even be a combination of various methods of teaching, to ensure learners can acquire the knowledge in a way that suits them best.

As knowledge has been acquired in advance, your face to face training needs to focus on the application of knowledge. This can best be accomplished in a peer led environment, getting staff to identify how the theory applies to them, perhaps trying roleplays, or quizzing staff on how they would react to a situation.

In a group staff can quickly get to grips with how theories apply to them, and having discussed it together, it is common to see staff continue these discussions after the classroom session has ended.

By moving the acquisition of knowledge out of the classroom, you can reduce the amount of time needed to deliver the same training, this means you can deliver more training sessions in the time available.

Hopefully this has given you an idea of how you deliver more training in less time by flipping the classroom. If you’d like to find out more then please get in touch, we’d love to discuss more about how you can implement the flipped classroom at your company.