Corporate Training Methodology Memo Lacking Investigative Leads

Real-Life Learning Projects Considered &7 don’t we just tell them the facts and any underlying theories? The knowledge metaphor, the one that says that teachers know some stuff that students don’t, naturally leads teachers to tell students what they know. Now let’s consider corporate training. The companies that contract with my company’ to build courses know that we will not use the learning by telling method. Presumably they are frustrated with the results that the telling method has pro- duced in courses that have been built for them by others. (In fact, they refer to it as “death by PowerPoint.”) This is why they come to us. Still they can’t help but ask the same subject-based question. How could they not? It is all they know. They went to school. They see the world in the way that school taught them to see it. They don’t ask the questions they should ask because they can’t. We need to transform badly formed educational questions into prop- erly formed ones. We need to transform subject-based questions into cognitive process-based questions. This means changing statements about the need to manage client relationships into statements about cognition, and statements about product launch into ones about cog- nition, and so on. What does it mean to make such transformations? It means asking what one does when one manages client relationships or when one launches a product. This is, of course, exactly what we ask clients in our first meeting with them. For example, we ask: What does one do when one launches a product? What I plan to do here is reveal what we do next, namely, the sub- ject to cognitive ability transformation process. We must do the transfor- mation properly and then make clear what one does in course design after one has figured out what really needs to be taught. Let’s start simple. Let’s imagine we want to train insurance adjust- ers to decide what compensation a policy owner is entitled to after a hurricane hits his property. (Yes, I do live in Florida, but I can’t say I care much about this process personally.) I found this on the Internet covering this subject: Catastrophe Adjusting Refresher Course Description: This is a course package comprised of three courses plus a bonus section and downloadable documents. One of the three courses is this: HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023813