I grew up in a family where getting in front of an audience was routine, but even at a young age I discovered my enthusiasm for a subject may not automatically transfer to my audience. Leveraging voice inflection, hand gestures and humor only goes so far.
There were times as a Scrum Master, trainer or coach when I failed to master the art of getting the audience engaged with the material. No matter how hard I tried, it was not uncommon to see some learners struggle with keeping their eyes open. If our goal is to leave our audience in a better place than we find them, then “talking them to sleep” is not the path we want to follow.
Adult Learning Principles
Using brain science to make training stick is just the tool I was looking for. Sharon Bowman developed Training from the BACK of the Room! – a body of knowledge that enables you to explore the most current “cognitive neuroscience” about effective instruction – how the brain takes in, stores, retrieves and uses knowledge. Her curriculum includes a book (she has several related books), a website, and the popular two day course.
Within Sharon’s content are six adult learning principles that beat talking our audience into a coma. Check these out.
- Movement trumps sitting
- Talking trumps listening
- Images trump words
- Writing trumps reading
- Shorter trumps longer
- Different trumps same
Sharon shares an interesting thought, “How can we expect the people we teach to remember what we teach if we don’t know how they learn…” Understanding the brain science that forms the foundation of effective instruction is like understanding the rules of the road.
So, where do we learn these brain science rules? Fortunately, I was invited to attend a class called Training from the Back of the Room. This two-day class is packed with ideas on how to “Step aside and let participants learn”. I benefited from numerous takeaways. Here are a few.
- We are not designing content, we are designing experiences
- Adult learning involves the body as well as the mind
- Learning is an act of creation, not consumption
- Positive emotions and mental imagery improve adult learning
I highly recommend this class for Scrum Masters, coaches and anyone who engages with audiences. In the same way self-organization brings ownership of plans and outcomes to teams, learning to train from the back of the room enables audiences to own their own learning. Engaged audiences are learning audiences. That sure trumps talking them to sleep!
Click here to begin your journey into Training from the Back of the Room.
Because lots of times the product owners aren’t coming to the training because they are busy or don’t understand the need or something like that. Now ScrumMasters acting as coach is I think this as perfect. They’ll build and coach them along the way as to touch points on how to write good user stories, where’s the vision for this, how do we help prioritize with them. So if we act as a coach to the product owner, I think that’s wonderful. Even as the product owner still comes, I think there’s a lot of value if you’re looking at it in the long term and beginning in the certified Scrum professional level and above then I think there’s lots of tool in the toolbox that I find useful again and again and again on the value of this. Keep in mind there’s over 300,000 certified Scrum Masters and not quite 60,000 at this point Certified Scrum Master Product Owners. So there’s a gap there which I think makes a Scrum Master take Product Owner Training to help fill that gap by taking those tools back to their workplace and into the marketplace as a whole.