Why aren’t adult learners actively engaged in training?
Guest Author Dr. Rayford Barner, MATD Alumni
Have you ever trained adult learners and noticed that after several minutes that they are looking at you with a blank stare? It is likely that such disengagement is due to overuse of lecturing. While I am not against the technique of lecturing, if used inappropriately, it can impact your audience’s interest, but to facilitate effective training, you need to get your learners involved. That is, you need to get them engaged with the purpose of the training so they can share their experiences and ideas with the other adult learners in the class. Facilitation is a learning process in which an instructor, teacher or trainer—called a facilitator—guides a group or individual toward a particular goal. Furthermore, a facilitator helps people move through a process; he or she is not the seat of wisdom and knowledge. The facilitator is there not to give opinions but to draw out learners’ opinions and ideas. Is this what you do when you provide training? If not, or if you only do it somewhat, don’t fret; I have compiled best practices to aid you in engaging your learners in the purpose of the training. Remember that facilitation focuses on HOW people participate in the process of learning or planning—not just on WHAT is achieved.
Before you get started, I want to introduce a few soft rules to help you with your facilitation:
Stay on topic and remember the purpose of the training
Develop and maintain a detailed process to guide your work
Always remember to demonstrate neutrality
Next, it is important to understand common uses for facilitation. I have provided a few. Can you think of others?
Brainstorming
Solving problems
Building team unity
Making collective decisions
I previously mentioned that lecturing has limitations. To a certain extent, so does facilitation. I suggest that you evaluate the purpose of your training to determine whether lecture or facilitation—or a blend of both—best support your adult learners’ needs. When evaluating your training, consider the role of the classroom’s configuration. Will your adult learners be seated in traditional rows, a “U” shape, a circle or several pods?
Now that we have gotten preliminary considerations out of the way, let’s talk about five key areas in which you can enhance your ability to facilitate training for adult learners:
Good practices
Teaching skills
Observation skills
Listening skills
Asking questions
Good practices
When facilitating training, encourage your adult learners to voice their ideas on the topic of
the training. To do this, skillfully elicit learners’ feelings and incorporate them into a class conversation. Adjust the cadence of your presentation to allow for active learning and self-referencing to occur—especially when the topic of the training may evoke emotion. This practice can instill trust in participants and help them feel that their opinions matter. Preferably, address learners by their first names. Of course, a few participants will be unwilling to get involved in certain aspects of the conversation; however, a good facilitator will notice their nonparticipation and extend an olive branch to get them to contribute. This helps earn the trust of all participants by showing that you as the facilitator are interested in what they have to say.
Teaching skills
A key to facilitating is honing your teaching skills to ensure effective delivery of the training content. Whenever possible, choose a position in the training environment that allows you to face the adult learners. Ensure that, as you speak and move about, you maintain eye contact with your audience. Finally, avoid distracting your audience while facilitating (e.g., by looking at your cell phone, having side conversations with other students, or bringing up personal matters).
Observation skills
Now that training is underway, and you are practicing good facilitation techniques, you must use keen observation skills to determine how you should focus your efforts to engage the adult learners. Constantly scan the room and note your audience’s facial expressions, body language, and movements. Do your best to determine the learners’ feelings based on what you have observed. Don’t be afraid make adjustments to your delivery based on your observations.
Listening skills
In addition to teaching and observation skills, you must also develop good listening skills. After listening to a participant’s words, paraphrase those ideas to demonstrate your understanding. By providing such a summary to the entire class, you can ensure clarity and allow the participant to further clarify comments. During this carefully orchestrated demonstration of facilitation, observe the participant’s emotions by politely commenting on the observed behavior related to the topic. Simply put, if a comment evokes a sign, such as an outburst or a nonverbal clue, ask those who demonstrate such behavior to chime in with their opinions. Warning: make sure this solicitation is based on the topic to avoid disrupting the training. Don’t be afraid to table questions that you cannot immediately answer. My suggestion is to tactfully place the comment into the “parking lot” and then address the concern during a break or after class.
Asking questions
Ask open-ended (rather than closed-ended) questions during your training session to engage participants. What is the difference? Closed-ended questions are specific and do not require much explanation beyond what is asked (e.g., “What is your name?” or “How old are you?”). Open-ended questions elicit detailed explanations and cannot be satisfied with a response of “yes” or “no” (e.g., “Why is this important to you?” or “Why did this occur?”). I suggest using Socratic questioning to elicit how your participants think and feel about the topic of discussion. Socratic questioning challenges the accuracy and completeness of learners’ thinking in a way that moves them toward their ultimate realization. Does your training have a goal or desired outcome? Plato and Socrates outlined six types of questioning that can draw out answers from participants.
1. Conceptual clarification: These questions dive deeper into underlying concepts (e.g., “Why are you saying that?” or “What do you mean by that?”).
2. Assumption questioning: These queries challenge presuppositions and unquestioned beliefs (e.g., “What might you be assuming?” or “Can you explain your assumption?”).
3. Rationale probing: These questions challenge weakly supported or poorly thought-out arguments (e.g., “Why is this happening?” or “How did this happen?”).
4. Viewpoint evaluation: These queries attack singular or narrow perspectives (e.g., “Why is this necessary?” or “Who benefits from that?”).
5. Implication probing: These questions challenge arguments’ sensibility and desirability (e.g., “Why is this important?” or “How did this affect you?”).
6. Questioning the question: These queries challenge the nature of questions (e.g., “Why was this question asked?” or “What other question might you ask?”).
Try them and see how they work. Remember, facilitation is a learning process for both you and your participants. By combining these techniques with quality presentation skills and knowledge of the content, your skills should increase tremendously. If you follow this advice, you should notice that participants will lead the class discussions and that you will act as a conductor of a symphony. That is, you will set up conditions that encourage class participation, collaboration and deeper understanding of the topic. I have provided several references to assist you further in understanding facilitation. Good luck!
Question for discussion: Can you think of other questions that elicit class participation?
References
Gottschalk, K. K. (1994). Facilitating discussion: A brief guide. Ithaca, NY: John S. Knight Writing
Program, Cornell University.
Renner, P. F. (1993). The art of teaching adults: How to become an exceptional instructor &
facilitator. Vancouver: Training Associates.
Socratic questions. (n.d.). Changing Minds. Retrieved from http://changingminds.org/
techniques/questioning/socratic_questions.htm
Ukens, L. L. (2001). What smart trainers know: The secrets of success from the world’s foremost
experts. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.
RU Training @ Roosevelt University in Chicago 
This was an excellent post. In most cases of active learning, I believe the audience feeds off the facilitator. If the facilitator is highly motivated and keeps the audience active by participating, asking questions, and keeping a fun environment, it will capture the crowd and become a memorable experience. However, if a facilitator lacks motivation or the drive to include adult learners, it could become boring, and the message may not be as successful as planned.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about facilitation. For me, facilitation begins with good instructional design–we can build many opportunities to engage learners as we plan instruction.
This was a great post, specially because of how it was outlined. Its funny, the intro asked us what should we do, lecture or facilitating or both? I asked myself the question, when is it ever beneficial to ONLY do a lecture. I feel like having a facilitator in everything or anything can only be beneficial. Even if the content is serious and must be delivered in a lecture style, in my opinion (and I can be wrong), yes adults may disengage because of the overuse of a lecture, but I think its been proven that its just hard to for adults to focus for a long period of time. Adults need that facilitator (in my opinion). Its hard to focus on a lecture for straight 20/30/40 min. I always know the importance of how you stand in front of a classroom and how the seatings should be but its still incredible how something little like this can really make an impact on their learning. Overall, great and interesting post.
Hi,
Great suggestions! As someone who has sat through seminars and training sessions, keeping the audience’s focus is necessary. It is important to constantly observe the reaction of the audience as mentioned in the article. Providing information to the audience in a way where they can relate it to their own individual experience is an effective training methodology.
Thanks!
As someone who is focusing their career on adult learners based in the corporate world I found this article insightful and hope for more follow-up content related to this topic.
Lectures can definitely get boring. I remember as a kid in grammar school during assemblies, we would fall asleep or goof around. And it’s the same as an adult. I am glad that there have been many changes and improvements with training. Getting people engaged is the key. I hated doing it in high school and early college years, but it really does help the individual grow and succeed.
This blog was a great read! It gave great insight on what is a facilitator and how to keep your adult audience engage throughout a learning lecture. The blog went into depth about teaching skills, observation skills, listening skills and asking the right questions for both the facilitator and the participants to gain valuable learning experience. I will use this information when I present in my graduate classes.
I think this was a great blog! I notice how often lectures get off subject or don’t really capture the audiences attention which leads us to sit in a classroom for 3 hrs uninterested. What I hope to use in the future and maybe in some of my classes this semester are more open ended questions to keep the conversation going and to have more students participate. Viewpoint evaluation & Implication probing are really great discussion questions and will hopefully challenge myself and others to dig more into certain topics and fully engage with our peers.
I appreciated this article for defining what a facilitator truly is and the various ways to keep an audience engaged. I have attended various trainings and have easily become disengaged- not because I wasn’t interested in the content, but because the trainings weren’t interactive and allowing or requesting participation. I have found this to be very common when attending webinars. Trainers of webinars can easily lose their audience due to the number one distraction of not being physically in a classroom for the training. I believe the questions above could prove beneficial to help adult learners become more engaged especially for web-based trainings. Via the web it would probably be a bit more difficult to stay on course when opening up the floor for discussions; however, I believe the trainings would still prove more beneficial in the end with more retained knowledge for attendees to apply. The suggested Socratic questions mentioned in the article are great conversation starters and should elicit lots of feedback and retention of information since they specifically focus on how the attendee feels about the topic.
These 6 approaches to open-ended questions are very helpful for strategizing and organizing training techniques. In addition to the suggestions provided in the list—conceptual clarification, assumption questioning, rationale probing, viewpoint evaluation, implication probing, and questioning the question—another open-ended question could be about locating and applying examples. This open-ended question could follow some of these other inquiries. E.g. after working on conceptual, assumptions, and rationale questions, learners could be asked to locate and apply examples that work (or don’t work) with the concepts, rationales, and assumptions.
The Socratic Questions are incredibly helpful. I can see using these as a facilitator and as a participant. Asking these questions as a trainee in discussion would spark conversation. Asking questions is a natural conversation starter but sometimes I feel stuck in my ways and I ask the same types of questions over and over. I rarely consider the function of questioning, outside of acquire more information. Coming into trainings or meetings with these question types and groupings will give me a question vocabulary and hopefully help me connect with others and better understand where they are coming from.
This was a great post. I can definitely relate to this challenge. Lecturing is my natural style of teaching and the most comfortable. I will say that when you have a good grasp on the subject your training on and you know it forwards and backwards, it allows you to have more flexibility to adjust to the needs of the specific audience as needed. Over the years, I’ve learned that teaching is not just about sharing information but it involves other skills such as facilitation and coaching that helps the learner come to the answer.
This a great post. I like the tips outlined and variations of methods. When engaging adults in training, I think it will be helpful to figure out the motivation of attendance.
The facilitator must have solid active listening skills. In my opinion training with an adult audience must flow like a conversation to be effective and have the greatest impact.
I believe this was a good title for the audience I like how engaging this draws to the facilitator, and also on ways that can be input into making better ways of allowing the audience to give more input and listening and listening skills at the same time.
I love the article, I think some adults want jobs handed to them oppose to trying to do things differently and expand. I like the ideas in the article on how to keep people engaged in training.
I think communication skills are so important in this regard. Especially for adults, open ended questions are vital , too, making people feel like there aren’t necessarily wrong answers. Listening is so important as well.
You have to always remember in training that all learners have a short attention span and after 30 mins. their brain dead. The ideas presented were good with some I will use going forward.
I used to give presentations and trainings on LGBTQ 101 as well as practices of diversity & inclusion in the workplace at businesses throughout Chicago. I also trained volunteers at a local community center. While I found this work very rewarding, I did encounter some of the challenges listed above at the beginning of this article. The previous formats that were in place I all but scrapped entirely. I tried many different amalgamations of these trainings in format, style and presentation. I tried various amounts of facilitation and lecture. Given my audience changed frequently it was hard to narrow what was most effective. Though I did find from a lecture standpoint, so long as the lecturer is charismatic, a great speaker, unbiased, and funny/relatable, holding adults’ attention was far more successful.
I found engaging audiences and allowing questions throughout the presentation kept their attention and spurred further thinking about some of the topics we covered. Interestingly enough, sometimes allowing a few tangents to rise made the presentation more fluid and gave a more relaxed environment that enabled people to be more comfortable in asking questions. There is moderation to this. One cannot let tangents completely steer away from being on message, but I think allowing a little every once in awhile can be a good thing.
I never did have any luck in facilitating brainstorming sessions though. I might have inherited a more cynical view towards them as my former boss hated them and found them to be such a waste of time. I’m curious to hear from anyone who success with brainstorming sessions and in what context they were in.
I like the ideas that were illustrated in this blog. It gives me ideas on how to engagement my team stay on top of the agenda/goal.
This is a great reference tool to use as a trainer. We are there to help facilitate and not to lecture. I like the tips given to help keep the learners engaged throughout a session. It is hard to keep focus when the person doesn’t find the information being presented meaningful or helpful.
I enjoyed reading this article. It is always a let down when you get into a training and realize it is more of a lecture. I tend to watch the instructor, but my mind wanders off. Allowing adult learners to be engaged in trainings and to take part is more useful than just speaking to them.
Good ideas. I think I tend to error on the side of lecture, attempting to explain the content better once I start to see to ‘lost look’ float over a few faces. I need to throw more questions out. There are always a few learners who will gleefully answer any question thrown their way. How to you effectively get responses from reluctant students without wasting too much time on those who do not want to participate?
How do you propose more facilitation in an environment that is very reliant upon Power Point?
This was a great topic with good tips on how to keep the audience engaging when being a facilitator, and also on ways that can be input into making better ways of allowing the audience to give more input and listening skills at the same time, I also believe we need more challenge in facilitating a different kind of audience. because sometimes just knowing what kind of audience you might have may make a big difference in present your information to.
This a great article. I think constant engagement through encouragement of ideas and team-building is necessary for adult learners. I also think its important to have an appropriate amount of breaks is also helpful, because it eliminates the need to attempt to respond to email.
M.
I appreciate the outline of balancing lecture style training with facilitation that draws out the experiences and perspectives of the learners so the class is working with one another. People enjoy speaking about their experiences and relationships can be formed when learning from one another. Another factor that I think impacts adult learners attention and participation in training, is that their “day job” is still running in the background with tasks piling up for them to complete when they leave for training. For school age students, learning is their “day job”. For adult learners, especially in the workplace, there needs to be more of a partnership between managers and trainers to provide employees with a moratorium to allow for a focused environment in classrooms.
I struggle with training employees every day. I’m knowledgeable about the subject and am able to perform tasks quite well but training is a challenge itself. This article has given me tools and ideas on how to actively engage trainee’s vs dumping information. I think this article does a great job of explaining what skills can assist a trainer. This article also does a great job of giving examples that are easily understood and implemented.
This article reinforced how important communication skills are for facilitators, and anyone really conducting training – both large and small scale. Active listening, engaging participants, and staying on focus is important for training to be effective. Adults learn differently and if we are to be successful we have to remember these useful tips.
This was a great blog it gave me ideas on how to be a facilitator and keep the audience engaging the tips that were used were
1. Good Practices, Teaching Skills, 3. Observations skills, 4. Listening skills, Asking questions these tips help keep the audience going as well as the facilitator on how to stay on top of the agenda as well as organized and focus on the adult’s learning.