SMARTER Activities
Activity 1: Evaluate and improve your existing design
Hold your training up against the seven principles. You’ll quickly see where the biggest gains are, without starting from scratch.
- Who is it for? Anyone who wants to make an existing learning design or training material more effective.
- Goal: Test and improve your design with a few targeted quick fixes.
- Time: 15-60 min
- Format: Individually or as a team
Activity 2: Deep dive into one principle
In group, choose one principle and explore it in depth. Your team builds shared expertise and adds its own ideas to the stack of HOW cards.
- Who is it for? Teams with some experience in learning and development who want to explore one principle in more depth together.
- Goal: Build shared expertise on one principle and develop your own set of applications that work in your specific organisational context..
- Time: 30-60 min
- Format: As a team, ideally 2 to 8 people
Activity 3: Find the cause when your training isn’t working as hoped
Start from a training problem that relates to you and check it against the seven principles. That way, you tackle the root of the problem instead of treating symptoms.
- Who is it for? Facilitators and learning designers who notice that a training works less well than hoped, because of what happens during the session or how it was designed.
- Goal: Find out what is getting in the way of learning, in the session or in the design, and tackle it in a targeted way.
- Time: 30-45 min
- Format: Individually or as a team
Activity 4: SMARTER Battle
Up for a challenge? Convince the others that your approach has the biggest impact. You learn through play. Your colleagues’ arguments stick better because of the discussion itself.
- Who is it for? Teams who want a playful approach and already know the basics of the SMARTER principles.
- Goal: Make a well-founded choice about which approach has the most impact in your context.
- Time: 30-60 min
- Format: Teams of 4 to 28 people, in subteams of 2 to 4.
Activity 5: Start SMARTER: Build the foundations for training that works
Haven’t designed a training yet? Or do you have little or no experience with making learning more effective? No problem. Get to know the seven principles and choose the one that lets you make an impact easily.
- Who is it for? Anyone who doesn’t have a design yet, or anyone with no or little experience in designing or facilitating training.
- Goal: Build basic knowledge of the seven principles.
- Time: 30-45 min
- Format: Individually or as a team
Activity 6: Create a rough learning design with the seven principles
You know what participants need to learn, but there’s nothing on paper yet? Use the seven principles as a guide and sketch a first design that is built on evidence-based choices from the start.
- Who is it for? Anyone who has learning objectives for a training, but no design yet.
- Goal: Build a first, rough design with the seven principles as a guide.
- Time: 60-90 min
- Format: Individually or as a team