Saturday, October 18, 2014

The Other AR - New Researcher Observations



The last couple weeks have been really, really busy for me at work.  Two trips out of town sandwiched a week of instructing at home, I have put in nearly 227.3 hours of work in two 14 day periods.  The point of my mentioning all of this is to underscore the constant go-go-go of my recent schedule and also note that I have had a lot of recent experience to analyze the training that is the subject of my Action Research project.  

It has been hard at times to allow adequate time to research for my AR project, and after many attempts of searching for pertinent articles I have finally been able to find examples that provide a wealth of information as well as unplanned potential directions to aide in my AR.  

Particular items that I have noted recently:

·         I had forgotten how tiring personalized training can be when training small groups on new information (specifically, information that trainees have not been exposed to in the past)
·         I need to give more attention to removing our assumptions of the knowledge level of those we are instructing
·         There is a need to provide a “Big Picture” outlook for personnel undergoing training
·         We are missing examples to help learners develop ways to use their analytical ability

The first bullet above is personal, and is noted to call out the need to involve students more in the process; less time of the instructors teaching, more time of the students learning and collaborating among themselves.  

The last three bullets will likely be where I spend a lot of time formulating my AR work.  The second bullet, removing instructor assumptions may be addressed by a short foundational course to lay the groundwork for the rest of the training.  This may require re-tooling the rest of the training courses to incorporate different learning strategies to aide in skill development coupled with the material.  The big picture need may be able to be addressed with new learning objectives and skills exercises while verbally engaging trainees to think about steps of the process and how they relate to overall objectives.  The last bullet is where I really feel like we are failing at training right now (albeit we get very positive notes on our current training), we can do better to help unlock the true potential of those we are training.

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