NYNP blog post 10-22-10

Extending Your Training’s Impact via Twitter Follow-up

Blog book tour for Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers

Jane Bozarth is an expert and evangelist for using social media for effective training - in fact, one of the reasons I first joined Twitter was because I’d heard her express her enthusiasm for it during her webinars.  And now she’s literally written the book on it - Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Expanding Learning.  I was eager to get to take a look at it as part of her blog book tour, because I’ve found her previous books to be really practical and useful.

In the nonprofit training community, many of us can be skeptical about incorporating new technologies that we’re not sure our training participants will be able to use due to time, expense, or lack of computer skills.  At the same time, we all care about making sure our training is high impact, so that we can help make a difference in improving our services for our clients.  So I’m going to focus here on one simple, low-tech way to extend training’s impact using Twitter, from the second chapter of Bozarth’s book - it’s a great idea I’m excited to share, because it addresses a real training challenge.

When designing training, a serious concern is “How will we help participants actually DO what they’ve learned once they get back to work?”  Jobs are hectic, people forget, and behavior change is difficult.  One promising solution is to use Twitter to help your participants bring your training content with them back to their real lives.

You can do this using a free application (Bozarth mentions Social Oomph, Twaitter, or Brizzly) to set up timed, automatic Tweets to your training participants periodically after the session.  The messages can provide encouragement, remind participants about key points, share links to articles on the same topic, announce related upcoming events, and give gentle nudges to participants to use the skills and knowledge from the training session.  

The Tweets will support your participants in implementing what they learning in training, and it will also create an extended learning community.  Because you can set up the Tweets in advance and because Twitter and the Tweeting application are free, this is a training add-on that won’t take much of your time or resources.  

If you’re curious about trying out social media to increase the value of training, this could be a simple yet high-impact way to start.

NYNP blog post 8-5-10

E-learning for change
Changing learners’ perspectives can change their behaviors


Last week, respected e-learning provider Allen Interactions offered a free lunchtime webinar series featuring Ethan Edwards, their Chief Instructional Strategist and author of the free ebook Creating e-Learning that Makes a Difference. He was assisted by Carrie Zens.


Each of the four days covered one of the elements of their CCAF (Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback) design model for creating e-learning that actively engages people’s minds in order to change their behavior in a meaningful way.  Edwards pointed out that engaging people’s minds is different from simply testing whether they can regurgitate facts.  He said that whereas many e-learning programs claim to be interactive because they include tests, genuine interactivity gets learners thinking and teaches them in such a way that they change their point of view.


I attended one of Edwards’ excellent Allen Interactions ASTD e-learning instructional design workshops years ago, so I know he’s an expert presenter and I was excited to attend the series.  The key points from each day are below.  


Context
An inviting and realistic context for e-learning helps people understand the point of what they they are learning and motivates them to engage with the e-learning.  It sets the stage for success by creating a relevant experience that is obviously worth the learner’s time and attention.


Rules of thumb - good context should:
1) be immediately obvious as soon as the learner opens the e-learning
2) relate to the audience’s needs
3) create concrete experiences
4) suggest a real-world performance environment
5) be helpful as a reference point for what the participants are learning
6) be visually appealing


Challenge
Edwards pointed out that a good challenge needs to tie in with the learner’s motivation, which is usually not the same as the company’s or the e-learning designer’s motivations;  this direct appeal to the learner’s motivation can counteract complacency on the part of learners by getting them to care about the e-learning.  Possible learner motivations include interest, success, curiosity, reward, or just plain completing the task.  On the other hand, learners are usually not motivated by tests, so unless a test is absolutely required, the learners’ performance can be evaluated by providing a challenge that requires the skills and knowledge taught by the e-learning.  


Rules of thumb - a good challenge should:
1) be clear
2) increase in difficulty as the learner’s skills improve
3) relate to the learner’s motivation
4) offer a meaningful risk of failure


Activity
Edwards shared that the most common activity in e-learning is reading or listening, neither of which are particularly engaging activities.  In addition, there is no real way to tell if these are even being done by the learner or not.  With reading and listening, any learning that happens is basically a matter of chance.  Reading and listening are commonly followed by an assessment, which only shows whether a learner can recall the right answer.  


A good activity, however, helps the learners recognize the right answer by applying what they’ve learned.  It simulates key real-world activities, which makes it much more likely that genuine learning will actually occur.  


Rules of thumb - a good activity should:
1) create physical involvement
2) build commitment to learning
3) encourage investment
4) transfer ownership of the learning from the e-learning designer to the learner
5) involve all of the senses because the story behind the activity is is so fully fleshed out


Feedback
Feedback is a motivating opportunity to teach learners, as they will naturally be interested in learning about why their decisions during an activity were correct or incorrect.  When e-learning is designed well, the context peaks the learners’ interest, the challenge and activity let them apply it, and the specific feedback deepens their understanding and lets them monitor their own learning.  When e-learning is designed poorly, it dumps all of the information on the learners at once, asks them to regurgitate it during a test, and then punishes them if they don’t remember everything, without telling them what was wrong or why.  


Rules of thumb - good feedback should:
1) clearly communicate correctness
2) preserve the learner’s response for reference
3) deliver new content, as learners will be much more interested in content at the point of feedback
4) demonstrate the consequences of non-performance
5) continually reinforce the context
6) delay judgement, to allow the learners time to figure something out for themselves
7) be compelling to the learner
8) require correct performance

NYNP blog post 7-1-10

Tips for Building Your Influencing Skills

Last night’s ASTDNY Training Director’s Special Interest Group was on the topic “Effective Communication and Influencing Skills for Learning Professionals” and featured executive coach Ginny O’Brien, author of Coaching Yourself to Leadership and founder of The Columbia Consultancy, a leadership-development coaching firm.

Be mindful about yourself, others, and your business
O’Brien opened by talking about the three components of her trademarked integrated leadership model, which are the same three components needed for effective influencing:
1) Lead authentically, from your heart.  This requires a deep understanding of your own personality and values.
2) Build respectful relationships with others.  This requires developing your emotional intelligence so that you can establish trust and build rapport with others.
3) Communicate a vision.  This requires being able to think strategically about where your business is now and where you want to go, and then being able to articulate how to close the gap between the two.

More info about this model is available at www.columbiaconsult.com.  

Communicate assertively
O’Brien focused on the following tips for assertive communication:
* Project confidence with your body language - show that you believe in your own idea
* Be clear - avoid rambling by writing down your message before talking about it
* Know where your audience is coming from and adapt to it
* Ask powerful questions to gain understanding
* Maintain your emotional boundaries, so that you don’t get deflated or lose hope
* Use deep breathing to control your physical reactions to your emotions
* Listen deeply - the more you listen, the more you can adapt your message in such a way that it will actually influence people
* Practice visualizing a time when you were at your most powerful and influential - see it and remember what it felt like when you were at your best, and then practice calling up this image and how you felt, so that you can tap into this feeling quickly at any moment.  You can use this both to prepare for important conversations and to regain control of yourself immediately if you hit an emotional trigger that makes you lose momentum.

Talk in such a way that others can hear you
O’Brien shared that effectively connecting with and influencing others requires consciously adapting your style to match others’ styles, and she referenced the DISC personality profile as a tool for doing this.  The DISC model groups behavioral characteristics into four general styles, which everyone displays to varying degrees:
1) Driven people tend to care about directness, clarity, concision, logic, data, and the win.  They hate wasting time.
2) Influencers tend to care about harmony and relationships, and so they seek out the win/win.  They tend to care more about engaging with people than about data.
3) Steady, amiable people tend to like logical methodologies and need time to process information.  They hate to rush.
4) Compliance-focused, analytical people tend to care about detailed and organized data, and they tend to stick to the facts over personal relationships.  They don’t want to be pushed into decisions, and they don’t want long conversations.

Her tip for figuring out which style is a person’s dominant one - which will guide you in matching your style to theirs - is to first look at a person’s energy in groups.  Drivers and Influencers are extroverts, so their energy will be high in groups, whereas Steady and Compliance-focused people are introverts and will exhibit low energy in groups.  From there, look at a person’s work style.  Task-focused people will be Drivers or Compliance-focused, and harmony-focused people will be Influencers or Steady people.  

A new meeting feature
SIG Chair Sanford Gold introduced a useful new meeting feature called Community Time, which sets aside time for the group to share challenges, solutions, and resources.

ASTDNY President Lance Tukell and President-Elect Jim O’Hern closed the meeting by encouraging participation at the chapter’s upcoming summer events, which can be found on www.astdny.org.

NYNP blog post 4-30-10

Article: Using E-learning to Train Youth Workers

The latest issue of the journal Afterschool Matters is available online today at http://www.niost.org/content/view/1645/297/. This issue is a special one with a focus on professional development, and Zora Jones Rizzi, Amita Desai Parikh, and I have an article in it called "Using E-learning to Train Youth Workers: The BELL Experience." Afterschool Matters is a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at the Wellsley Centers for Women, with support from the Robert Bowne Foundation.

In collaborating on the article, I was grateful to have the opportunity to talk with Managing Editor Georgia Hall, who offered insightful direction, and work with Editor Jan Gallagher, who provided skillful editing and guidance.

The article's downloadable at http://www.niost.org/pdf/afterschoolmatters/ASM_Spring2010.pdf, and here's the abstract: "BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) cut training costs by two-thirds and improved outcomes for students in its summer program by developing e-learning modules for program staff and managers." Hall's Welcome from the Editor says, "Marquart, Rizzi, and Parikh, in 'Using E-learning to Train Youth Workers,' offer an effective model for overcoming familiar challenges to staff training such as limited resources, staff turnover, and multi-site programs. BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) has successfully implemented blended online and in-person training to train its summer program staff."

NYNP blog post 4-5-10

Notes on professional writing
Keep it simple, crisp, and focused on clients

During the last couple Leadership and Strategy classes, Professor Sermier provided some perspectives on good professional writing that I thought would be useful to share.

"If you can't make a crisp argument, you probably don't understand what you're talking about."
Simplicity and clarity not only help others understand, but also demonstrate the writer's understanding. People who understand something deeply can express a complicated idea in plain English, because they know how to reduce the idea to its essence. On the other hand, people with a lack of understanding often try to hide their confusion behind overly elaborate language.

"In 40 years of professional life, I've never read a document of more than four pages that had any value."
As described above, good communication is focused and clear. Most lengthy documents can be boiled down to include just the good information hidden within too much text.

For the most part, executives should receive short documents with three components:
1) the problem
2) potential solutions
3) the recommendation and why

"If the clients say the service is lousy, the service is lousy."
As usual, Sermier emphasized keeping the clients in mind. Fuzzy writing can hide clients and their needs behind confusing metaphors, irrelevant statistics, insignificant anecdotes, and more, which distracts people from what should be a nonprofit's main purpose - serving clients. On the other hand, clear writing can bring challenges to light so they can be addressed.

"Don't waste people's time with spelling or grammatical errors."
Always read documents over before sharing them.

NYNP blog post 3-29-10

97 More Nonprofit Job Boards

New York Nonprofit Press is a great resource for job postings via the E-Newsletter, website, and monthly newspaper.

However, if you're engaged in a serious job hunt, you'll need to use more than one resource to find job openings. So, you may want to check out this listing of 97 nonprofit job boards. It's available here: http://j.mp/7eBuVC or http://bit.ly/cvSqsA

Thank you to Nathan Grimm, @n8ngrimm, for sharing this resource via Twitter. (I'm at @MattheaMarquart if you'd like to get in touch.)

NYNP blog post 3-23-10

Five steps to transform a judging mindset into a learning one
Action Learning Conversations open up new thinking

Tonight's ASTDNY chapter event featured Dr. Victoria Marsick, Co-Director of the J.M. Huber Institute for Learning in Organizations, a principal of Partners for the Learning Organization, and Professor of Adult and Organizational Learning in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Dr. Marsick introduced the concept of Action Learning Conversations (ALCs) as a tool for peer mentoring and coaching. ALCs are 45-minute group conversations using the ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, and Decisional) Framework, which moves conversations from focusing on the objective facts of the situation, to reflecting on feelings and reactions, to interpreting what the feelings and reactions mean, and finally to deciding on what actions to take.

ALCs provide a structure for getting help from peers and seeing situations in a new light. Rather than discussing or debating a challenge, which can activate defensiveness and entrench people in old ways of thinking, ALCs require listening, questioning, and thinking together, which can transform people's perspective. ALCs create an environment of win-win, where people can learn in a safe space, rather than win-lose, where people end up judging each other and closing off their thinking.

The five steps
1) Share a challenge framed as a question. The person with the challenge shares, then the group asks clarifying objective questions to learn more about the context of the situation. Then the person with the challenge may indicate the specific help needed.

2) Question-storm. Everyone silently writes down one or two reflective or interpretive questions, then the group shares the questions in a round robin while the person with the challenge silently listens and writes. After this, the person with the challenge may share a few insights learned so far, while the group listens without asking any questions.

3) Share assumptions. Everyone writes down their assumptions about the situation, and then the group talks about the assumptions as if the person with the challenge were a fly on the wall. The person with the challenge silently listens and writes, and is invited to join the conversation only after everyone else in the group has had a chance to share their thoughts.

4) Reframe the challenge. Everyone writes down how they would re-frame the original question, and then the group shares these in a round robin while the person with the challenge silently listens and writes. After this, the person with the challenge may share a few insights learned so far, while the group listens without asking any questions.

5) Identify action steps. The person with the challenge identifies next steps.

Tips for successful ALCs
Dr. Marsick advised that diversity of thinking is helpful for ALCs, so if members in a group all know each other well, it's useful to get a couple less familiar people to join in. Also, if one group member is known to be a strong personality, it can be helpful to get a facilitator, to prevent that person from taking over the ALC. Facilitators are also good for groups who have trouble following specific processes, especially because it can be difficult for people to ask real questions rather than asking fake questions that are really problem-solving advice in disguise. When the fake questions start flying, facilitators can step in and model what it looks like to genuinely inquire about facts, feelings, or thoughts.

The proof in the pudding
We had a chance to practice a mini-ALC during the chapter event tonight, and my group was really helpful with the challenge I shared. In the end, the ALC process succeeded in uncovering some of my hidden assumptions, in helping me reflect on other perspectives, and in reframing the challenge into one with a more optimistic outlook.

Recommended reading
* Understanding Action Learning by Victoria Marsick and Judy O'Neil
* Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work by Marilee G. Adams
* Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change by Chris Argyris
* "The Political Brain," by Michael Shermer in the July 2006 Scientific American, reporting on research by Emory University psychologist Drew Weston

NYNP blog post 3-22-10

The importance of evidence to serve clients well

Professor Sermier's Leadership and Strategy class last week focused on the use of evidence and data to manage better. Sermier emphasized that when setting goals, leaders need data - they need both accurate information and an understanding of why the data tells that story. With this data, leaders can get unexpectedly powerful results; without it, leaders can waste countless resources by sending organizations in useless, ineffective directions.

Sermier also encouraged the class to remember to focus on our clients. When doing so, data becomes framed as information in service of the clients, rather than simply being cold numbers. Therefore, Sermier suggested that leaders only request that someone do the hard work of providing accurate data if there's at least a 75% chance that the data will enable better decision-making to benefit clients.

Facts vs. opinions
To punctuate his point, Sermier referenced the following quote attributed to former Netscape CEO James Barksdale, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in a Harvard Business Review article in January 2006: "If the decision is going to be made by the facts, then everyone's facts, as long as they are relevant, are equal. If the decision is going to be made on the basis of people's opinions, then mine count for a lot more."

Relevance for nonprofit trainers
In the same way, trainers need to focus on client-centered facts over opinions when designing training sessions. Session design should begin with a needs assessment that considers data, rather than with preconceived ideas and assumptions. Designing training based on evidence will allow trainers to develop staff in a way that meets clients' actual needs, and serving clients in this way is a real win for nonprofit trainers.

NYNP blog post 3-17-10

A lesson for trainers from financial regulation

Last week was Public Affairs Week at Baruch College, and the Wednesday topic was New Directions in Financial Oversight, with Michael Alix and Jonathan Chanis, PhD.

Alix is a senior vice president at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, working in the Bank Supervision Group (although he noted that he was expressing his personal opinions); previously he served as the chief risk officer at Bear Stearns. Chanis is Managing Member of New Tide Asset Management, LLC, and has worked in finance, and emerging markets and commodities trading for over 20 years; he is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of The Energy Forum, and a trustee of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

Both speakers said that they are in favor of well regulated financial markets, but they had different perspectives about what that means.

Chanis explained the difference between the "financial economy," which deals with managing money and credit, and the "real economy," which deals with actual goods and services. The financial economy is supposed to be an adjunct to the real economy. He explained that the economic crisis was triggered by problems in the financial economy which then impacted the real economy, and he suggested that we need to figure out the optimal size of the financial economy in order to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, because the financial economy had recently grown so much that its impact on the real economy was enormous. From there, we need to regulate the financial economy to prevent companies and people from making a profit by taking advantage of the government; for example, right now if a bank takes a risk and loses, the government bails them out and makes the taxpayers pay for it, but if a bank takes a risk and wins, they get to keep all the profit.

Alix appeared to be in favor of much looser regulations. He said that financial market reform has the goal of supervising the collective systemic risk from all institutions, rather than supervising individual institutions. He said that regulation requires redesigning "incentives, infrastructure, and insolvency regimes," and making information more transparent and accessible so that we can have insight.

Keeping it simple
In a breakout session afterwards, Professor Sermier pointed out that the message of the evening could be boiled down to the idea that it's not reasonable to expect human beings to operate against their own best interests. For example, at the individual level, if given a choice between making a lot of money quickly or not, most people will choose the money for themselves and their families, even if it's not the "right" thing to do because of a risk of contributing to a financial crisis. That's why we need the government to protect us from ourselves by establishing sensible regulations.

Takeaway for trainers
The idea of regulating the financial markets is about making people do the right thing even when it's easier or more tempting to do the wrong thing or to do nothing. Just telling people about the right thing will not change their behavior, so we need to do more.

In the same vein, just telling people about a desired workplace behavior will not make much of a difference. That's why training needs to go further - we need to motivate participants to improve or change, persuade participants about the value of the new skills, help participants practice new skills, let participants plan how they will use their new skills when they are back at their jobs, involve managers in supporting the change, and essentially help participants do the right thing on the job even when it's easier to or more familiar to do the wrong thing or nothing.

NYNP blog post 3-10-10

Six career tips from two experienced public servants

Last week's Leadership and Strategy class featured guest speaker Dall Forsythe, Professor of Practice at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service and former budget director for the State of New York under Governor Mario Cuomo. Forsythe and Professor Sermier were colleagues at the NYC Board of Education under Chancellor Frank Macchiarola. They discussed their experiences with leadership in government and also shared concrete career advice.

Three career tips for the short term
Forsythe shared three career tips for young professionals interested in public service:
1) Be able to communicate well both with words and with numbers. Governor Cuomo used to say the following when hiring a candidate with little experience: "What's the difference? He's smart and he can write well."
2) Understand politics.
3) Consider working in a budget office. They are great places to work - you learn a lot, you gain skills, and you gain professional credibility.

Three reasons to find your passion in the long term
Sermier shared three reasons to find your professional passion:
1) If you are ambitious and want big opportunities in your career, you need to develop the right skills and a good reputation; this requires actually doing the work well over time, which requires passion.
2) To be a good leader, you must display optimism, and in order to do that during tough times or amidst irritations, you need to work at a job you value, so that the small stuff is irrelevant to your fulfillment.
3) If you work at something you enjoy, you won't need to make a lot of money because you won't be obsessed with retiring.

NYNP blog post 3-1-10

Sermier's ten steps for managing and leading

During last week's Leadership and Strategy class, Professor Sermier shared his sequential ten-point framework for managing and leading an organization:
1) Know yourself
2) Know your boss or bosses
3) Know your key executives and staff
4) Terminate non-productive executives
5) Identify your key stakeholders and what each wants
6) Identify your five major problems
7) Identify your five major goals
8) Communicate your major goals
9) Actively pursue your goals
10) Celebrate your successes

The first step is to know yourself, because until you can manage yourself and get comfortable with yourself, you won't be able to manage anything else.

Additional dimensions: focusing on clients and motivating teams via respect
Sermier shared a perspective of leadership as essentially including everything involved in management, with an added dimension of doing the right thing. In nonprofits, doing the right thing means keeping your clients in focus at all times, and making sure that the focus on clients guides decision-making.

For many nonprofit staff, that focus on clients will be inspiring. However, that's not all that's needed to motivate and lead a team. To motivate people, you must show them respect, and because that's a vague concept, Sermier clarified what it looks like to do so:
* Learn and remember names
* Never complain
* Make your team members look good
* Publicly support your team when the stakes are high
* Publicly take the heat for the team's mistakes
* Use "we" when talking about problems, to signal that you see solving problems as a team effort
* Be hopeful within reason; give your team a sense that there's a better future
* Accomplish things together, then celebrate together
* Encourage dissent
* Hold yourself accountable, and admit mistakes
* Give credit and praise
* Be guided by a moral compass

NYNP blog post 2-21-10

Advice for career success
Find a job where you fit, you care, and you accomplish with a team you respect

Last week's Leadership and Strategy class (see my post from 2.3.10 for more info) focused on understanding how organizations work, in order to make good decisions.

Professor Sermier led us through a comparison of the private, nonprofit, and government sectors using the following lenses:
1) The bottom line
2) The complexity of processes
3) How success is defined and measured
4) The value of evidence vs. the value of opinion when making decisions
5) The role of competition
6) How CEOs are evaluated
7) The impact of the press

Career advice
Sermier, whose career has included jobs in each of the sectors, shared the advice that in order to give ourselves the best possible chance to succeed in our careers, we need to choose the right sector, the right part of the sector (for nonprofits, that means social service, cultural, university, foundations, or health care), the right size organization, and the right organizational culture and structure. Perhaps most importantly, we need to find the right fit for our passions, because it's difficult to succeed at something that we don't care about.

Whatever the sector, when we've chosen a job, it can be helpful to keep our thinking simple and remember that any organization is basically a bunch of people trying to get something done together. With that in mind, some keys to success at work include:
* treating people fairly
* encouraging enough dissent to know that you're doing the right thing
* setting up rewards for doing well and penalties for doing poorly
* creating a common statement about what you're trying to accomplish as a group
* avoiding creating too many rules, while at the same time establishing basic systems that help people understand their common interest

NYNP blog post 2-23-10

Weekly Live Twitter Event for Trainers
Community Offers Collegial Support, Ideas, and Humor

Last Thursday, I participated for the first time in a weekly live online Twitter event called #lrnchat. This is a weekly guided discussion about training and learning, organized around a particular topic, with participants joining in from around the world via Twitter or a Twitter conferencing suite (I used twubs.com/lrnchat). #lrnchat's tagline is "Where Learning & Social Media Meet." Participants range from newcomers to widely known experts in the education/training/learning/e-learning fields. Transcripts of the chats are posted on the @lrnchat Twitter page, and are also searchable using the hashtag #lrnchat.

What are these about?
Thursday's topic was "Your perfect learning environment?" and the questions were
Q1) If you had a blank slate, what would your ideal learning environment look like?
Q2) what are the barriers keeping your ideal learning experience from becoming real?
Q3) What would be the most important positive thing that could happen to make that ideal state become real?
Bonus) How could #lrnchat as a community, help with either boosting the positive or beating back the negative?

The previous week's topic was "Confessions of trainers and learners," and this week's topic is "The Learning Delta," with questions about how training has changed over the years and how it will change in the future.

How could it benefit nonprofit trainers?
Chatting with training and learning enthusiasts last week was a great way to step back from the day-to-day of my job and hear other professionals' ideas about the field. The conversation was informal and honest, which encouraged participants to take a risk and share their thinking. When patterns emerged, it was interesting to see where folks shared idealist hopes or pet peeves, and it was also interesting to see where people respectfully disagreed.

For trainers who work in small departments or as the only trainer at their organization -- which is the case in many nonprofits -- #lrnchat offers a community of like-minded professionals to learn from, bounce ideas off of, and provide mutual support.

Participating in #lrnchat also taught me a bit about the potential and limitations of using Twitter as a learning tool. As a new Twitterer, it let me jump right into a new type of learning and try it out in a safe environment, and it was a lot more fun and useful than I'd expected. At first, with so many Tweets going by really quickly at times, it felt a little overwhelming, like trying to take a sip from a waterfall, and it was an adjustment to be in such an informal learning environment, with a lot of joking around and friends greeting friends. However, it didn't take much time to get comfortable, and the value of the event quickly became clear.

If you'd like to give it a try
Events take place on Thursday nights at 8:30EST and last for 90 minutes; this week they are adding an ongoing afternoon event at 4:30EST on the same topic. #lrnchat is hosted by@marciamarcia, @quinnovator, @moehlert, @koreenolbrish, and @janebozarth (I first heard about this on one of Jane Bozarth's webinars). Artwork is by@delanotho. For more information, you can go to http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/

NYNP blog post 2-15-10

Teacher Training: A Key to Education Reform

Last Thursday (February 11), I attended a panel at New York University on Teacher Quality: The Key to Closing the Achievement Gap?

The panel was moderated by Dr. Amy Ellen Schwartz, NYU Professor of Public Policy, Education, and Economics, and Director of the NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy. It was presented by The Wagner Education Policy Studies Association, The Wagner Economic and Finance Association, and the Institute for Education and Social Policy.

The panelists were:
* Sara Coon, Director of Evaluation and Organization Development at Achievement First, a network of charter schools in New York and Connecticut
* Kim Marshall of the Marshall Memo and New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit that recruits, trains, and supports urban principals
* Jen Mulhern, a Partner for Policy at The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that recruits and trains teachers with the goal of ensuring that children with high need get outstanding teachers
* Peter Oroszlany, founding Principal of Mott Hall V Middle School in the South Bronx, one of the top ten schools in NYC

Dr. Schwartz opened by discussing the persistent and disturbing achievement gap across the US between children from poor and wealthy communities and between children of different races. She pointed out that the national discussion once focused on fixing this problem by tackling it at a macro level, but because the problem still persists, national attention is now turning toward the micro level, specifically focusing on teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Marshall pointed out the importance of this focus by referring to widely cited research showing that five years in a row of effective teaching for every child could completely close the achievement gap (Hanushek, Kain, O'Brien, & Rivkin, 2005), but right now any US child has only a 1 in 17,000 chance that this will happen (Walsh, 2007).

The panelists discussed ways to recruit and retain excellent teachers, measure teacher performance, develop a culture of high performance, and hold teachers and principals accountable for student outcomes. One key they mentioned was teacher professional development.

Key notes about teacher professional development
* Marshall said that "teacher mediocrity is widening the achievement gap" and one way to change that is by providing the professional development needed for teachers to improve dramatically. He said this should involve catching teachers' issues in real time and fixing them right away so that they don't build up, as well as having teacher teams look at student data in real time and decide how to take action.
* Oroszlany suggested that professional development is essential for modeling lifelong learning and for professionalizi ng teaching as a respected career; he encourages the teachers at his school to invest in their own professional development, and he creates opportunities for them to take the time for development.
* Mulhern said that meaningful professional development is essential for supporting teachers, particularly new ones, so that the job is not sink or swim; she noted that there is a lot of bad professional development out there, so there "needs to be a sea change" in improving the quality and applicability of teacher training so that it covers how to use and apply data and strategies immediately.
* Coon said that the best professional development is ongoing and job-embedded, with a great deal of coaching and feedback, which is why Achievement First assigns a coach to every teacher and treats "teaching as a team sport." For schools without the resources to do this, she said that online professional development that includes video will be necessary to help develop teachers.

Panelists' recommended readings
* Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles. Who's Teaching Your Children? Why the Teacher Crisis is Worse Than You Think and What Can Be Done About It.
* Daniel Weisberg, Susan Sexton, Jennifer Mulhern, and David Keeling. The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Teacher Differences.

NYNP blog post 2-8-10

Three tips for up-and-coming learning leaders
Advice from senior leaders

Tonight's ASTDNY Training Director's Special Interest Group featured a panel of senior learning leaders discussing "Managing your Career: Skills and Competencies associated with the CLO Role.' The panel was assembled by Dr. Lyle Yorks, and the panelists were:
* Dr. Lyle Yorks, Associate Professor of Adult and Organizational Learning, Columbia University's Teachers College
* Sherwin Chen, Vice President of Learning, Prudential
* Bettina Kelly, Senior Vice President, Talent Strategies Group, Chubb & Son
* Jeff Wetzler, Senior VP, Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development, and Chief Learning Officer, Teach for America
* Deborah Wheelock, Leader of Global Talent Management, Mercer

The panel offered advice for training professionals about getting ready for top leadership roles in learning and talent management.

Be an asset - build personal credibility
Dr. Yorks kicked off the panel by sharing some of his research on the traits of successful Chief Learning Officers. His advice: "Be an asset. Be able to present your work as a key enabler to meeting business strategy."

The panelists echoed this concept of the importance of personal credibility, focusing on the importance of being able to deliver results both as an individual contributor on a high profile project and by assembling a great team of people and putting processes in place that enable the team to pull off great things. The keys are to demonstrate what you can do, project emotional strength and resilience, and always have an opinion but be willing to change it based on data.

Develop political savviness
Two quotables on the topic of political savviness were Chen's "It's all about people's perception of you and how you can influence people who don't report to you" and Wheelock's "Be savvy to the point that when you have a meeting, you already know the meeting's outcome because you've done your pre-work of talking to people."

The panelists advised developing deep relationships with people at all levels of your organization, building allies and coalitions within your organization, networking with people outside the organization to learn about their strategies, and understanding the company's climate. Learning leaders need to be able to lead laterally, including motivating and inspiring people around you.

Develop business acumen and a deep understanding of your business
All of the panelists stressed the importance of sharp business skills. Wetzler advised, "Deeply know the business, the industry, and the company's priorities and strategy. Think about the big picture and be a learning strategist." Kelly advised "Be agile, and know your organization's current appetites and where the opportunities lie."

When discussing business acumen, the panelists talked about the need to manage change, convey the learning function's return on investment in business language that appeals to senior management, connect the dots about how your function contributes to the company's strategy, forecast what the workforce will need to be able to do in the future and build the company's competence to do it, and be able to quickly assess a situation and communicate what you see.

Readings recommended by the panelists
* HR Competencies: Mastery at the Intersection of People and Business, by David Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank, Dani Johnson, Kurt Sandholtz, and Jon Younger
* Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change, by Patricia Shaw

NYNP blog post 2-3-10

"Doing things right" versus "Doing the right thing"
A simple differentiation between management and leadership

Tonight was the first night of Ed Sermier's Leadership and Strategy course at Baruch College's School of Public Affairs, which I'm excited to be taking this semester with many of the United Way Senior Fellows from my cohort in 2008. The course will be examining the concepts of leadership, management, and strategy in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Since a lot of trainings focus on leadership development, I'll share some of the insights from this semester here in this blog, as there will be many relevant takeaways for nonprofit trainers.

One thought-provoking takeaway from tonight's class was Sermier's description of the difference between management and leadership: management is about doing things right, and leadership is about doing the right thing. This means that managers focus on efficiency, which is essentially about making existing processes better, whereas leaders focus on effectiveness, which includes thinking about the existing picture and making changes if something should be different in order to be right. Because leaders need to understand the existing picture in order to think critically about it, they need to have a strong understanding of management.

Sermier asked the class to remember that in nonprofits, an important part of being a leader and doing the right thing is helping people who have the least power -- our clients -- especially when the people who do have power lose sight of them.

NYNP blog post 12-2-09

Comparing three websites for free educational videos
There are so many websites with free instructional videos that I thought it would be useful to compare three that trainers may be able to use. (See my prior post "Resources for free university-quality educational materials" for some additional websites with free videos.) The sites below are well regarded, with many thousands of users, but each one is quite different from the other two.

Academic Earth (academicearth.org)
Academic Earth currently offers video courses from UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. The videos range in length from one minute clips of speeches to entire courses with twenty or more separate video lectures. The website's goal is to provide everyone on earth a user-friendly, one-stop location for accessing a world-class education. Videos feature leading academic scholars and can be explored by topic, school, instructor, thematic collections called "playlists," or by doing a search. The website's design is secondary to its function, so it's organized in a straightforward and intuitive way. Videos are not extremely high quality, but they have a professional feel.

TED: Ideas worth spreading (ted.com)
TED, which started out as a conference that brought together Technology, Entertainment, and Design, offers "riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world." It has grown to include the topics of Business, Science, and Global Issues. Because of its origins, the website's design is much more sleek and cutting-edge than the other two sites. For example, while the videos can be explored by topic or by doing a search, they can also be explored by "newest," "most emailed this week," "most comments this week," "most favorited all-time," or by the following ratings: jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny, and informative. Most videos are longer than the average video online, starting around 15 minutes, as the talks, presentations, demonstrations, and performances go in-depth. The speakers include thought leaders and celebrities.

Teacher Tube (teachertube.com)
As you might guess, Teacher Tube appeals to a specific audience of educators. The website's goal is "to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos." Like YouTube, videos are contributed by members, and membership is free and open to anyone. Thus, the videos are not professionally filmed or edited, but rather homemade. They include videos of people talking directly into the camera, animated PowerPoint presentations, animations, staged skits, and even singing and dancing. The videos can be explored by doing a keyword search, or by categories that reflect the primary goal of creating a community: featured, recently added, most viewed, top rated, most discussed, most favorite, most linked, and most responded.

NYNP blog post 1-27-10

Does anyone agree on what counts as e-learning?
Allison Rossett is taking a look

Yesterday I attended a Training Magazine webinar featuring Allison Rossett on the topic "Elearning Is Not What You Think It Is." I've been a fan of Rossett since I got to see her speak this summer at the International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace and The eLearning Guild's Instructional Design Symposium (see my blog posts from 6.10.09 and 8.3.09 for details), and she was excellent once again.

Rossett is a professor at San Diego State University, and she and one of her colleagues, Jim Marshall, recently conducted a study on today's definitions of e-learning, today's e-learning practices, current aspirations for e-learning in the future, and organizational barriers to e-learning. In yesterday's webinar, Rossett shared some of their study's findings.

It was interesting to learn that amongst the almost 1,000 respondents, the top five e-learning practices today are:
1) Our programs include tests of skills and knowledge
2) We use computers as part of classroom instruction
3) Our programs present content and opportunities to practice and receive feedback. Employees work on these tutorials at a time of their own choosing.
4) Our programs use visuals with an audio track. Employees watch and listen at a time of their choosing.
5) Our programs are based on realistic scenarios which press employees to make choices and learn from the results of those choices.

The least selected response was "Our programs are delivered on mobile devices."

If you'd like to see the recording of the webinar, it's archived on Training Magazine's network at

http://www.trainingmagnetwork.com/topics/show/893 or http://bit.ly/arossettrecording.

If you'd like to participate in the study, Rossett and Marshall are still collecting data, and the SurveyMonkey link is available at
http://tinyurl.com/elearningpractice.

NYNP blog post 11-23-09

Six ideas for e-learning design

Last Friday, I attended a workshop titled "Strategies for Delivering Effective eLearning in Trying Times," hosted by e-learning company Kineo. I had worked with Kineo's UK partnership when I was at BELL, and they recently launched Kineo's US arm. It was a pleasure to see Kineo Partner Mark Harrison again, as well as meet US CEO Steve Lowenthal and US VP of Learning Design Cammy Bean.

As part of the workshop, Kineo demo-ed many of their e-learning designs, which can be seen on their website, kineo.com. It was interesting to see samples of their work, as well as several diverse ways the open source learning management system Moodle can be customized.

Here are six ideas from the workshop that you might find useful, especially if you work at a nonprofit that's short on time or resources:

1. Speed, rather than excellence, is the new wow factor. The difference between excellent and ok design is sometimes just not that big a deal anymore, but the difference between taking weeks to meet a project's goals versus taking months is truly impressive.

2. Use a fuzzy graphic to keep reviewers from ruining a project. Cammy shared a time-tested designer's trick for solving the problem of having too many reviewers who all want to put their mark on a project even when it's to the detriment of the project - intentionally include a fuzzy graphic. If you include a flaw like a fuzzy graphic, the reviewers can point it out and thereby feel like they've made a contribution (and hopefully leave the rest of the design alone).

3. You'd have to be bonkers to pay for an expensive LMS. With open source LMS options like Moodle, which are easy to use and highly customizable, there's no reason to pay for an expensive LMS. Mark shared that not only is Moodle widely used by corporations (this is backed up by a recent study by The eLearning Guild), but it's also used by the US military because the military finds it more secure to control their LMS themselves, rather than relying on a proprietary LMS.

4. Design e-learning like a magazine. Rather than forcing all learners into a linear experience, design e-learning that can be explored the way that readers explore magazines. Allow for browsing, provide a menu, and create an attractive look and feel that encourages voluntary exploration.

5. Have consultants hand off e-learning that's not finished. Some Kineo clients have found that they prefer to do the last-minute changes themselves, so Kineo has handed off e-learning that's almost finished, but not quite. The company creates e-learning that's easy for clients to edit themselves, which lets clients change their minds about the final wording as many times as they like because they control the content themselves.

6. Get the bloat out of the design process. Skip the 30-page design document, and go right to the mock-up. Better yet, start creating concrete designs during a meeting rather than merely talking about hypothetical designs, so that everyone's on the same page.

NYNP blog post 11-6-09

The latest issue of the International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning (iJAC) is out today at http://www.i-jac.org. Zora Jones Rizzi and I have an article in this issue, titled "Case Study of BELL E-learning: Award-Winning, Interactive E-learning on a Nonprofit Budget."

The article's downloadable at http://online-journals.org/i-jac/article/view/975, and here's the abstract: "BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) is a nonprofit organization offering academic tutoring to elementary school children from low-income, urban communities. BELL launched a blended learning training for the tutoring staff working in its summer program in 2008, and won Training Magazine’s Blended Learning and Performance Project of the Year. The e-learning from that blended learning training is discussed in this paper."

NYNP blog post 11-18-09

Debunking the Myth of Training ROI
Notes from Michael Molinaro's provocative ASTDNY presentation

At last night's ASTDNY meeting, Michael Molinaro, Corporate Vice President and Head of Leadership Development at New York Life Insurance Company, gave a presentation titled "One Last Time: What's the Deal with ROI?" In his presentation, he took on the much-hyped training industry focus on calculating return on investment (ROI). ROI is basically the amount of money earned by spending money.

Focusing on the trend of measuring ROI for soft skills training like executive coaching and leadership training, Molinaro gave three succinct reasons not to measure ROI:
1) You can't
2) You don't need to
3) You oughtn't want to

You can't measure ROI
Molinaro pointed out that current formulas for measuring ROI are basically guesses. The models all factor in a percentage weighting for how confident the person doing the calculations is in the validity of the rest of the formula, which essentially invalidates the entire calculation because it's never close to 100%. After all, what CEO would bother with an accounting figure that the accountant believes is only 65% accurate?

You don't need to measure ROI
Molinaro stated that there is no point in going to ridiculous lengths to come up with a mythical ROI number when there is a wealth of research that backs up the value of developing employees. If the point of ROI is to justify the need to spend budget money on training, then the existing data already meets that need. He suggested that a better use of time and resources is to focus on linking training to organizational strategies and goals.

If you need hard data about the value of training and developing employees, he referenced the following three studies:
- Laurie Bassi, Paul Harrison, Jens Ludwig, and Daniel McMurrer (2004) published "The Impact of U.S. Firms' Investments in Human Capital on Stock Prices," which discussed their research finding that companies that spend more on training perform better in the stock market.
- Bruce Pfau and Ira Kay (2002) published The Human Capital Edge: 21 People Management Practices Your Company Must Implement (or Avoid) to Maximize Shareholder Value, which discussed their study of over 750 companies which found that companies with effective human resources practices can increase their shareholder value by 47% more than companies without effective human resources practices.
- Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (1999) published First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, which distilled information from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by the Gallup Organization and found that good management is the key to strong organizational performance.

You oughtn't want to measure ROI
Molinaro said that it's demeaning to try to put dollar figures on the work of a field like learning and development, which is a field primarily focused on human beings rather than numbers. He urged the attendees to have the courage to believe that because this field involves different work than businesspeople' s jobs, we should be held accountable in different ways.

A final note
Lance Tukell, Director of Global Training & Development at Chartis and next year's ASTDNY chapter president, suggested that an alternative to calculating ROI is to ask at the start of a project: "What is success to you? What do you need to see?" This will result in much more useful information about how a training project will add value to a company.

NYNP blog post 11-2-09

Recommended reading for leadership development

Tonight's ASTDNY special interest group (SIG) for training directors was a roundtable discussion comparing leadership development strategies and processes. Moderated by new SIG Chair Jim O'Hern, the Director of Learning and Development at Hess Corporation, the group discussed our experiences with leadership training programs.

As part of the discussion, participants shared a number of recommended books. If you're interested in your own leadership development, or are creating leadership training, you may want to take a look at these books, which include useful tools, exercises, and ideas:

* Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

* FYI: For Your Improvement, A Guide for Development and Coaching by Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger

* Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars

* StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath

* What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter

* Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations by Dannemiller Tyson Associates