Spring, 2006
I’m fascinated by human interaction and communication. Helping people discover their strengths and talents energizes me. That’s why I read everything I can regarding communicaiton, personalities, learning styles, expanding skills, and changing attitudes. Mel Silberman’s updated classic, Active Training, caught my attention with its promise of giving me a “proven and reliable method for enhancing involvement, learning, and change.”
As I study Silberman’s work, I’m expecting to learn not only how to make classroom instruction more engaging, but also have to more effectively communicate the principles and practices necessary to make teams (boards, committees, task forces, for instance) produce more meaningful results. In today’s non-stop, over-communicated, over-whelmed, burned-out marketplace, we’ll all need to have a learner’s mindset just to keep up. Silberman’s Active Training aims for “real learning” that results in increased abilities and understanding.
Introducing Active Training
“Training is a method of enhancing human performance.” No doubt most of us think of “school” or “classroom” or “lecture” whenever we hear the word training. School, classroom, lecture: all are passive. Effective training is active and “active training occurs when the participants do most of the work.”
Such training involves six processes:
- hearing
- seeing
- questioning
- discussing
- doing
- teaching
You’ll need to use more than one process to make training effective. Silberman lists retention rates for corresponding intstructional modalities to illustrate his point:
- lecture (learners retain approximately 5%)
- reading (learners retain approximately 10%)
- audio/visual (learners retain approximately 20%)
- demonstrations (learners retain approximately 30%)
- discussion (learners retain approximately 50%)
- practice by doing (learners retain approximately 75%)
- teachings others (learners retain approximately 90%)
Lectures only won’t lead to effective training due to several problems:
- lectures appeal primarily to auditory learners
- lectures hold audience attention loosely–audience attention decreases with each passing minute
- lectures promote lower-level learning (stresses facts and recall over assimilation and application)
- not all learners need the same information at the same pace
