Take-Aways: Learning Capture Activity

Unfortunately most corporate training yields poor learning retention.  This is a result of the way in which adults learn and the disconnect between the learning style and the teaching style.  Adults are experiential learners.  Classroom training does not maintain the attention of adult learners because when placed in a classroom adults are easily distracted by the myriad of other priorities in their lives.  Did I pay the mortgage, did I pick up the dry cleaning, will I finish my monthly report on time, etc.  Solving for the learning disconnect requires that companies take a fresh approach to training.  

At Groove Management we believe that training must be highly interactive and engaging.  We build our workshops to be experiential and rely very little on lecture.  There is one component that we include in each and every session and we call it the Take-Aways close.  Every Groove Management session ends with this simple learning capture activity.

We end the session by requiring each participant in the program to share one "Take-away" from the session.  The take-away is something they will remember, something someone said, an activity they did, a comment someone made or a personal commitment they are planning to make as a result of the session.  By articulating a learning, an individual is more than twice as likely to retain that knowledge.  By having the entire class share their learnings with one and other, the overall learnings from the session get recapped and the activity serves as a great summary for the session.

Next time your team engages in a training workshop, consider ending with a "Take-aways" session.  The impact will be long lasting and the participants will value the session even more as a result.