Introduction
Reinforcing important points is a critical but often overlooked step for nascent trainers 🎓. If subject matter experts or other non-trainers are delivering training, you can bet that reinforcing important points will be all but non-existent 🚫.
With the second season of House of Dragons 🐉 being released on Max, my wife and I decided to rewatch the first season 📺. We found that we were both surprised by two things. One, we were surprised at how much we had forgotten since the last season 🤯. And two, we were surprised by how much more we understood 🧠.
Many people fall victim to the notion that if something is explained to learners one time, in one way, then they will understand it 💡. Not only will they understand it, but they can change their performance as a result of that understanding 📈. It’s important to recognize that this is rarely the case 🚫. In 2002, Isabel Beck, Linda Kucan, and Margaret McKeown found that learners needed to be explicitly exposed to a new word between four and ten times to learn it well enough to use it in practice 📚. If a single word needs to be reinforced four to ten times for a person to learn it, it’s safe to assume that the new process you are training your front-line employees on will need much more than one exposure for your class to pick up on it 📋.
In this post, we will discuss what reinforcing important points is and some practical tips for how to do it 🛠️.
What is reinforcing important points?
Reinforcing important points is a checkbox ☑️ on just about every trainer observation form out there. So it’s important to understand what it is.
Reinforcing important points is a strategic approach in corporate learning and development that involves repeatedly emphasizing key concepts 💡, information 📄, or skills 🛠️ to ensure they are retained and understood by learners 🧠.
In today’s fast-paced corporate environment 🏢, change is a constant 🌪️. Every day, there is something new or a shift in priorities, and there is a lot of noise both inside and outside of work that demands the attention of your learners 📢. Strategically reinforcing important points can have a major effect on what your learners take away from your courses 🎓.
A few impacts to consider:
Improved Knowledge Retention
•Repetition of key concepts helps to stress the important takeaways to participants. Forcing them to focus on the central learning objectives leading to better recall, application, and long-term memory 🧠.
Boosted Confidence
•Reinforcement will help participants feel more confident in their knowledge and abilities 💪. This confidence will lead to an increased willingness to put the new knowledge or skills into everyday practice 📆.
Reduced Training Time
•When important points are strategically reinforced, employees will often require less re-training or follow-up coaching ⏳. This leads to more efficient use of training resources and time 🕒.
Considering those benefits, let’s examine a few best practices for reinforcing important points in the classroom 🏫.
Example
I was asked to sit in on a training session and provide feedback a few months ago 📅. The trainer was delivering soft skills training on de-escalating customers ☎️. I sensed a little confusion in the room about what the key takeaways were for the training because the trainer was reinforcing points. They were not reinforcing important points. Multiple times, the trainer mentioned how their dog 🐕 was a therapy dog and could de-escalate any situation. In fact, at one point, the trainer told a five-minute story about how the dog did just that. This was a sixty-minute training, and none of the skills that the dog used were applicable to de-escalating customers over the phone 📞. So, the trainer spent more than ten percent of their time reinforcing points that were not applicable 🚫. Hence the confusion in the room.
A few best practices to consider:
Check content alignment
•Using a story for engagement is a great best practice 📖. It can be even more powerful if you refer back to that story throughout your training as a running analogy 🔄. Doing so is a great way to increase engagement and reinforce important points at the same time, but only if the point you are reinforcing is actually important ✔️. Make sure you fully understand the learning objective and use story and analogy to complement it.
Use Transitions
•Using a summary transition will not only provide additional exposure to recently covered topics, but it will also help connect the dots with what has already been covered 🔗. If you need a reminder about different types of transitions, like the summary transition and the location summary transition, you can revisit my post about them here 📄.
Use Multimodal Methods
•It’s important to mix up the way you deliver important points 🎨. You don’t want to simply say the same thing over and over; you should be using different tools and methods to share the same information. Those may be in a verbal form, like a story or analogy 🗣️. They could also be physical, like visual aids that you direct learners to engage with or activities 🖼️. Even still, they could be role plays, simulations, or even quizzes 📊. Get creative! 🎨
Build a Strategy
•Before going into training, assess the tools you have at your disposal 🧰. Your tool sets will be different depending on if you are virtual or live 💻🏫. The amount of time you are allotted for the training can also be a factor ⏰. Map out how you will reinforce the points that you need to drive home and make notes so you remember to do it 📝. Practice makes perfect 🎯.
Conclusion
Reinforcement is a big part of how adults learn 📚. Maintaining an unrealistic expectation that just because you hit a point one time in your training, they will remember it is doing your learners a disservice 🚫. It’s almost just as ridiculous of an expectation as Garfield holding an open book on his head, thinking that the knowledge will somehow seep into his brain 🐱📖. Take satisfaction in the fact that properly reinforcing important points will improve retention 📈, increase confidence 💪, and reduce training time 🕒. Build your strategy for underpinning crucial topics, and soon, it will become second nature 🌱. That’s all for now; leave your comments below or shoot me a private message 📬.
Discover, learn, grow: Remember your local library 📚.
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