101 Learning and Development Tools

Essential Techniques for Creating, Delivering and Managing Effective Training

Kenneth Fee

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780749461089
• eBook ISBN: 9780749461096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

101 Learning and Development Tools is your practical guide to all the most up-to-date training techniques, organized around the classic learning and development cycle. Whether you need a quick, ready solution or some guidance on where to go for in-depth information, this is your essential reference guide. It picks up from where you are in the process of managing learning, and helps you place it in a broader context. Each chapter is a mini guide to each tool with: a description of the tool analysis resources needed cost implications cross-references to help you identify alternative or related tools for further study or investigation 101 Learning and Development Tools is the indispensable, all-in-one-volume reference book for both professionals in the field and students learning about the subject.

PART ONE

Learning needs analysis

This part of the book considers a range of 27 tools that contribute to learning needs analysis.

02

Understanding learning, development, education and training

X-REF TOOLS
8	Informal and non-formal learning
21	Knowledge management: distinguishing data, information and knowledge
49	Reference list of learning and development methods

The most elementary tools we have available to us in learning and development are words themselves: the language we use helps us better understand what we are dealing with and helps us better communicate ideas. Rather than simply assuming definitions of common terms, we can benefit from developing a deeper, and hopefully shared, understanding of what the language of learning and development really means.

People often confuse the most common terms, the fundamentals, and so it helps if we can strive for a shared understanding of them. Essentially, learning and development are things that learners do; they are about acquiring knowledge, skills and capabilities. ‘Education’ and ‘training’ are terms for the inputs to learning and development provided by teachers, trainers and others, including teaching, training, instruction and coaching.

In my 2001 book A Guide to Management Development Techniques, I challenged this orthodoxy, and offered an alternative classification, in which each of these four terms is a subset of a broader term: training is one part of development, which in turn is one part of education, which in turn is one part of learning. I have since relented, and accepted the more common approach, which puts learning and development on the learners’ side of the equation, and education and training on the teachers’ and trainers’ side.

Whatever position you take, you should be able to explain and justify it, and not just use terms because everyone else is using them. If you take ‘learning’ and ‘development’ to mean the same thing, you should not use both terms together, just one of them. This is like the way ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’ are often bracketed together, when many users mean both words as the same; yet just as general learning aims and specific learning objectives may be distinguished, so may learning and development.

The waters are further muddied by the use of scientific (or would-be scientific) terms to encompass all of this. Educationalists tend to speak of ‘pedagogy’ as the science of education, as the term for their theory of learning. The origins of this, in children’s education in schools, are understandable, but when the term is used more widely, in adult education and training, it has strayed far from the original Greek definition of ‘leading the child’. Keen to retain an ancient Greek term, some have suggested alternatives: Malcolm Knowles suggested andragogy, ‘leading the man, or the person’; and Stewart Hase suggested heutagogy, ‘leading the self’, or self-directed learning. These distinctions help clarify what we are trying to accomplish in learning.

For some, all of this may be too academic. But the lesson is only to use language when it is relevant and correct; otherwise all we do is mystify and confuse, when our mission is to help and to explain.

FURTHER READING

Chapnick, S and Meloy, J (2005) From andragogy to heutagogy, Ch 3 in Renaissance eLearning, Wiley, San Francisco

Downs, S (1995) Learning at Work: Effective strategies for making learning happen, Kogan Page, London

Fee, K (2001) A Guide to Management Development Techniques, Kogan Page, London

03

L&DNA grids

X-REF TOOL
30	Using the learning and development cycle to plan learning interventions

Learning and development needs analysis (L&DNA) grids introduce quantitative methods to the analysis of learning and development needs. They are a means of plotting responses to specific questions on a grid and generating scores for each area under question.

One sort of grid is a self-assessment tool, where learners may be asked to score themselves against a set of criteria listed down the left-hand side of the grid, or the Y axis, choosing from a number of options along the horizontal dimension, or X axis, of the grid. The options could include ‘no skill’, ‘need a lot of help’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 01 The learning and development cycle
• Part one Learning needs analysis
• Part two Planning learning
• Part three Implementing learning
• Part four Evaluating learning
• 101 You
• Full Imprint