Before You Plan a Teaching Day
Six questions to answer before anyone writes an agenda. For anyone who organises, commissions or signs off training.
Most teaching days are planned from the agenda outwards: a date, a room, some speakers, a feedback form. Afterwards there are photos, packs and a pile of smile sheets, and nobody can say what changed.
Plan it the other way round. Start with the change, not the event. Answer these six questions, in this order, before anyone books a room.
1. Who are the learners, and where will they use this?
What can they already do? What gets in their way at work: time, rotas, kit, access needs?
Watch for: “everyone in the service”. If you can’t picture the learner, you can’t design for them.
2. What’s the need?
What happens now, and what should happen instead? Is that gap something teaching can fix, or is it really about staffing, equipment or policy?
Watch for: a training day as the answer to a system problem.
3. What should people be able to do afterwards?
Write one to three outcomes with verbs you could observe: explain, demonstrate, decide, escalate.
Watch for: “be aware of”, “understand”, “appreciate”. You can’t see any of those, so you’ll never know if they happened.
4. How will you know?
What would show it worked, on the day and a month later? Who will notice?
Watch for: attendance lists, smile sheets and photos. They show the day happened, not that anything changed.
5. What will learners do?
What will they practise, discuss or make, so they leave able to do the thing in question 3?
Watch for: an agenda that’s a list of speakers. Watching isn’t practising.
6. What happens after the day?
What will people revisit at 30, 60 and 90 days? Who will hold them to it, and what support will that person give (time, release, a slot at the team meeting)? Who owns the follow-up once the day is over?
Watch for: commitments nobody follows up, and a Teams channel nobody opens.
If you can only do one thing: answer question 3 before you write the agenda. Everything else gets easier once you know what people should be able to do.
These six questions are the design canvas used throughout the three sessions. Print it:
The ideas behind it: constructive alignment, Miller’s pyramid and the Kirkpatrick model.