Active Training: A Handbook of Techniques, Designs, Case Examples, and Tips, 4th Edition

With objectives set and a variety of training methods at your disposal, you are in a position to develop all of the specific training activities you will need in an active training program.

THE THREE MAJOR INGREDIENTS OF ANY DESIGN

Earlier, we compared opening exercises to appetizers at the beginning of a full meal. Continuing with this delectable analogy, let's consider all the separate activities in an active training program as items on a menu or, if you prefer, dishes in a meal. Each item or dish has certain ingredients. Individual training activities have three: an objective, a method, and a format. How the objective, method, and format combine together is the basic recipe for the design. Your decisions about what is to be accomplished (objective), how it is to be accomplished (method), and in what setting it is to be accomplished (format) will determine the design you wish to create. Let's examine two activities to illustrate these points.

The first example is an activity called “The New Contract.” In this activity, the following major decisions have been made:

1. The objective is to compare the “old contract” that described the historical employee-organization relationship to the “new contract.”
2. The method employed is jigsaw learning, described in Chapter 5.
3. The format is pairs.

Figure 7.1 presents the details of this design.

FIGURE 7.1 THE NEW CONTRACT

The second example ...