Adult Learning in IVCF - Ministry Exchange (MX)

Integrative Paper for MHOD 550
Rich Lamb
Professor Roxanne Helm

Adult Learning and Instructional Design In the Ministry Context of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, as an educational enterprise, occupies a
domain in between late adolescence and early adulthood. InterVarsity is a
Christian ministry to college students, and, for the purposes of this paper
and review, is involved in a number of training efforts to two primary
audiences, which are similar but differ in important ways. First,
InterVarsity staff primarily seek to influence, through mentoring
relationships, small group community, preaching/teaching and training,
undergraduate and graduate students as they go through their college years.
IVCF both ministers to students and, significantly, ministers through
students. Training of student leaders and others in the ministry is a key
means by which the purpose of InterVarsity is achieved.[1]

The second distinct population which is the audience and recipient of
InterVarsity training is the InterVarsity campus staff team. InterVarsity
employs about 900 field staff, of which about 700 work directly on campus
with students. The average hiring age for these staff is 24, and on average
they remain employed with IVCF for about 5 years. IVCF hires about 120
campus staff every year, and as our employment numbers have been stable
over the last three years, we see about that many people leave our
employment ranks as well. IVCF staff alumni go on to graduate study, often
to seminary but to a variety of other disciplines as well, and many go on
to become pastors, missionaries, counselors, or other professionals. The
high-quality training they receive in their staff years becomes a key part
of their growth and development, and often is a part of what attracts them
into employment with IVCF in the first place. While IVCF is known (to the extent it is known) for its high-quality,
thoughtful and deeply Biblical training, I believe IVCF has much room for
improvement in its development of training methodology, and this paper is
an attempt to synthesize my learning and thinking on this topic. To begin,
I simply make the astonishing observation that, in IVCF, hundreds of staff
every month deliver thousands of hours of training instruction to students
on a host of ministry topics such as evangelism, discipleship, small group
leadership, and cross-cultural ministry, and yet IVCF staff receive almost
no training on the topic of training itself. I would like to see this
changed, and hereby take up the challenge to articulate a few first steps
in this direction.

Adult Learning and Andragogy
Malcolm Knowles is referred in the literature and on the web as “the father
of adult education” in this country. He did not coin, but advanced, the
term “andragogy” (“man teaching”) to contrast the more typical “pedagogy”
(“child teaching”). Daily compares pedagogy and andragogy in seven areas
(structure, atmosphere, leadership, planning, motivation, communication,
evaluation) and in each case andragogy is described in ways that are
objectively superior, more open, more attractive. (For example, under
atmosphere, pedagogy is described as “Win-lose” while andragogy is
described as “Win-win”.)[2]

My own experience, with my own children in public schooling, is that
the ideas that inhere in andragogy have taken root in the educational
establishment such that, today, even grade school children are taught with
a great many of the advantages of andragogy. So widely received is Knowles’
and others work in this area that the old rote systems of “one-way,
downward communication techniques” of pedagogy have substantially given way
to “two-way, mutually respectful, supportive techniques that allow feelings
to be expressed”, for example. And yet, the irony is that young elementary
school teachers, freshly minted from education degree programs, have
thoroughly embraced a modified andragogy, while the teaching styles of
university professors, who are working with students much closer to the
adult age in view, often do not depend heavily on these insights.[3] Fundamental to any theory of learning, child or adult, is the
recognition that “merely hearing something and seeing it is not enough to
learn it.” [4] Instructors in college use a variety of means to reinforce
the learning that is the intended outcome of their courses: 1) they assign
weekly homework to reinforce the principles being taught, or papers to
allow students to demonstrate facility with and comprehension of the course
material; 2) they provide discussion sections or in-class discussion
involving two-way communication, allowing students to test their
comprehension and receive immediate feedback; 3) they provide comprehensive
testing of the course material at the end of term; and finally 4) they have
the incentive of grades which are perceived to promise pecuniary and non-
pecuniary rewards both now and later in life. But of course, in training
settings beyond the institutional setting, usually these kinds of
reinforcements do not easily obtain. Specifically, in the context of
InterVarsity, we almost never have the extrinsic reward structure of
cumulative testing and grade assignation that help to motivate learning
that otherwise might not carry intrinsic rewards with it. Therefore, all
training in an InterVarsity context will need to include specific reference
to the intrinsic rewards associated with accomplishing the training
objectives, for each individual as well as for the mission of the
organization. This insight will prove crucial for a proper understanding of
the necessary training strategy for adult learners in IVCF. Knowles’ premises of andragogy are worth delineating in brief: 1) Self-Concept. As a person matures his self concept moves from one of being a dependent personality toward one of being a self-directed human being.[5] 2) Experience. As a person matures he accumulates a growing reservoir of experience that becomes and increasing resource for learning. 3) Readiness to learn. As a person matures his readiness to learn becomes oriented increasingly to the developmental tasks of his social roles. 4) Orientation to learning. As a person matures his time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject-centeredness to one of problem-centeredness. 5) Motivation to learn. As a person matures the motivation to learn is internal.
These generalizations can be made a little more pointed for InterVarsity
student leaders and staff, who are the primary audiences for InterVarsity
training. 1) Self-Concept. A student leader or campus staff person not only must have achieved a measure of self-direction, but has come to see (or has begun to see) herself as a disciple (or “disciplined learner”) of their Lord, Jesus Christ, and specifically an adherent to his teachings and principles as outlined in Scripture. Hence, though it is not sufficient to base training principles in the teachings of Jesus, it fundamentally serves to establish the authority of the trainer to do so. 2) Experience. A student or staff person’s experience is a great reservoir from which to draw for training and learning. This experience base is, at least, three-fold: a) general life experience, b) specific past ministry experiences upon which to reflect, and c) scripture study experience from which to draw general Biblical principles as well as an understanding of the principles of Biblical interpretation. It needs to be said that this body of experience may serve to reinforce the lessons of some specific training objectives, or it may serve as a barrier that needs to be overcome by the exertions of the trainer in order for the learning to take place. Experience and expectation do not always positively serve the objectives of the training experience. 3) Readiness to learn. Unlike an audience in public school or even in college, a gathering of student leaders in InterVarsity (or a similar gathering of staff) is a gathering of motivated learners. Like many (though certainly not all) adult learning environments, those in the room for a leadership training experience have made a second-level choice to be there. At some point they made a first-level choice to participate in a group or activity, but then (usually after some time) they made a secondary choice to take a leadership role in the group, which usually involved costs and sacrifices of time (at least) in order to participate in leadership training opportunities. So they are (presumably, on average anyway) in the room ready and attentive to the needs of the moment because they have chosen to pay the time cost to be there. Therefore, they enter the room ready to learn-a huge advantage to a trainer trying to influence the group. But it also means that each person in this audience will be fiercely evaluating the individual and specific benefits to himself or herself, even perhaps on a weekly basis, and making decisions over and over about his or her readiness to re-up, to recommit to the corporate and individual learning process. She is ready to learn, but if the learning doesn’t come or deliver intrinsic value, she will cut her losses and drop out of the cohort. Because our trainees, at the student level at least, are volunteers, ruthless cost-benefit evaluation will happen as a matter of course. 4) Orientation to learning. In an InterVarsity context, the generalized problem of the problem-centeredness of the premises of andragogy is the problem of trying to live out the values and teachings of Jesus in a contextualized fashion. The trainer must connect the specific attitudes, skills, behaviors and knowledge to be conveyed and trained to the learner’s growing internalization of the need to grow as a lover and worshiper of God and a lover and servant of people, in the campus context in which the learner is found. I will illustrate this below. 5) Motivation to learn. I believe the motivation to learn is internal for everyone, children and adults. I don’t believe this needs to be taught, but it can be unlearned or atrophy over time. Yet for the primary audience of InterVarsity training, this motivation is built in to the self-selection of the group. One of InterVarsity’s most deeply embedded cultural values is an appreciation for growth and development. Whether staff or student, a participant in an IVCF training experience is likely to be highly motivated to learn. This however, doesn’t mean that learning will take place, as we will examine below.

Social Learning and Active Training
Maslow taught that human beings operate with two sets of needs that are
potentially in tension, a need for growth and development (hence change)
and a need for security (hence resistance to change).[6] In any educational
or training endeavor, resistances to change and learning must be identified
and, to the extent possible, mitigated, minimized or overcome. One
important means for this is through the social setting of the learner-a
learner experiencing new ideas or being given new skills will be more open
to the personal change needed to incorporate these skills if this person is
actually included in a group (and not just locationally present with others
in a room). Bruner describes the social side of learning as a “deep human
need to respond to others and to operate jointly with them toward an
objective.”[7] In the InterVarsity context, learning in a group (or even
more effectively, in a team) reduces resistance and mobilizes peer
socialization on behalf of the training objectives: people in the room want
to improve in their evangelism skill, for example, because others in the
room are seen as valuing this. This self-reinforcement of the learning
environment also offers opportunity for on-going reminders, as the role of
the trainer is taken up by peers and fellow students who may reinforce the
lessons/skills of the training through modeling and encouragement.

Active training, as taken up by Silberman, is based on these core
insights: 1) durable and usable learning takes place only after repeated
and various pathways in the brain are activated; 2) different people tend
to learn in different ways, so multiple channels of communication and
reinforcement are needed to reach the broadest population; and 3) the
social component of learning is useful both for reinforcing the concepts of
the training as well as for reducing the fear or anxiety due to change.
Active training is specifically not simply means by which otherwise
restless and anomic participant trainees are oriented, engaged and kept
alert. It is a means by which effective trainers marshal multiple channels
and strategies to communicate, convey information and to change attitudes
and behaviors. Active training, in the context of InterVarsity student ministry,
most commonly takes the form of a discussion consisting of small group and
large group components. In my experience it is rare to have a training
setting which involves a one-way flow of information as the exclusive or
even the primary means of communication. . Jon has a group of 30 staff in the room for a ninety minute session on servant leadership. After a five minute introduction, he has them take 10 minutes to read over John 13:1-17, in which Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. They discuss what they have read for 15 minutes in small table groups, responding to a couple questions. Then he leads an open discussion in the large group, concluding with three principles of servant leadership by way of summary. Jon concludes the session with ten minutes of announcements and closes in prayer. . Carrie is training a group of 15 students on evangelism. Carrie gives a brief talk, presenting a simple model based on Jesus’ interaction with the woman at the well of Sychar in John 4. Then she has the group break up into threes and talk about how this model could be used in their own campus context. She then regathers the trios for a large group discussion, followed by small group prayer for evangelistically fruitful conversations. Carrie encourages the students to mention specific names of their friends as they pray.
These are the most common examples of active training, and would, I
believe, comprise about 90% of all IVCF training settings.[8] This
familiarity with some measure of active training offers both an advantage
and a disadvantage to the establishment of high quality training in IVCF.
Positively, because staff fully expect that training involves active
participation by the recipients, staff would be receptive to encouragement
toward greater creativity in the forms that activity could take. But
negatively, staff trainers have fallen into some formulaic patterns that
satisfy the demand for active training without taking full advantage of a
spectrum of activities that reinforce the learning in the best way.

Toward a Renaissance of Training In InterVarsity
Most of the training IVCF staff receive is of the kind that is meant to be
used with students, or at least to be adapted for use with students. Most
of our ministry training involves attitudes, skills and knowledge that we
need staff to have for the purposes of their ministry with students, which
involves passing along those attitudes, skills and knowledge to their
student leaders and others. For example, training in Biblical teaching,
small group leading, evangelism, cross-cultural ministry, or leadership
development works in this way. We train staff-they in turn train students.
In fact, it is axiomatic that staff will quickly turn around and train
students on almost whatever topic they have recently been trained in,
assuming the training was motivational. This, in fact, is why staff tend to
receive training well-they are motivated to turn around quickly and
multiply it in their training settings with their students.

The difficulty of this is that very little training happens that is
not meant to be quickly and easily passed on to students. The exception to
this is notable: staff are trained in fund development (FD), while not
expected to pass that training along to students. For a long time FD
training has been the sole training offered at InterVarsity’s Orientation
for New Staff gathering every year. Meta-training, or training on training
or the educational process itself, is not abundant in IVCF staff training.
For staff to receive such training they would usually need either to 1)
make an opt-in decision to receive some of the specific training available
(like public speaking training or expositional preaching training), or 2)
seek it outside the organizational setting. This places a barrier that
means the typical campus staff person receives almost no specific training
on training during their entire time on staff with IVCF.[9] One solution to this might simply be to begin to advocate for the
inclusion of “training” as a topic for staff training and to suggest that
this needs to be added to whatever standard body of curriculum is current.
A few barriers stand in the way: 1) While several generalizations can be made about the state of training in IVCF, very little organization-wide training exists in IVCF because of the regional balkanization that has characterized most of the last few decades. While this fractured state is abating somewhat, several efforts have been made to proffer a modular but generalized training curriculum approach, but these have had only partial and limited acceptance. 2) Because many staff people and almost all successful staff are or feel themselves to be, by some measure, effective trainers, they may not personally have a felt need for training on training. Few staff are natural evangelists or fundraisers so they recognize a need for training in evangelism or FD, but training is a little bit like the water we swim in. 3) While training on training would undoubtedly help staff build their training muscles, in fact it would not readily be turned into training that staff could use with students. As a case example, I have been a part of a group of staff that developed a game, “The Chapter Building Game,” that is meant to help staff make good choices with their time to grow their campus fellowships. It is a game that takes about an hour to play and debrief, and includes teamwork, discussion, decision- making and consequences, and luck for a pretty energizing group activity. The only problem is that once a staff trainer has taken a group of staff through the game-it ends there. The staff participants do not return to the game later for reinforcement of the lessons. However, when the game was adapted as “The Small Group Leaders Game,” the training took on another level of organizational traction, because at this point staff could play the game (with some learning involved) and then turn around and play it with their students. This is the fundamental nature of training uptake in IVCF-anything a staff person receives he or she wants to pass on to his or her students. If that is not practicable, then it is not as deeply motivational. Organizationally, InterVarsity is ripe for a renewal of its training
technology and methodology. Alec Hill joined IVCF as president, and brought
together a cabinet of vice presidents over the next two years. In the 4 and
a half years since Hill began as president, the ministry of IVCF to faculty
and students has not grown numerically, and has experienced several
personnel convulsions that resulted in needed organizational introspection.
Recently, IVCF has embarked on a development program that has “Chapter
Building” and “Chapter Planting” as its core efforts. (I have been asked to
lead the Chapter Building initiative.) These initiatives are designed with
hopes of expanding both the geographic reach of IVCF by beginning new and
enduring work at campuses around the country and growing the existing works
on many campuses where the ministry currently struggles. Over the past two
years a Chapter Building Task Force has met and has produced a widely
distributed summary of the characteristics of growing chapters that
highlights the importance of leadership training underpinning a strategy
for group growth.[10] So as campus staff around the country are galvanized
by a vision of growth and a growing body of tools and insights about how to
achieve it, development of training on training could become a key part of
the package of tools available for staff, at a time when staff supervisors
are open to changing the mix of training staff receive for the purpose of
chapter growth. In the second part of this paper I will propose a set of insights
toward instructional design that derive from the observations and theory
noted above. Part 2: Instructional Design

Any effort at designing a training program or module must begin with some
sense of the needs of the people or organization for which the training
offers some solution. Training is never an end in itself-it always serves
as a means to the accomplishment of organizational or individual
objectives. The literature often assumes that an organization will have
people who satisfy the training need (either in the HR department or
through outsourcing the training) who are not themselves line supervisors.
In general, organizations don’t assume that people who have expertise in
certain functions also have expertise in the initial training of new
employees in that function, which ensures that people who are trained as
trainers have a durable place in today’s economy.

However, in InterVarsity, training is one of the key activities of a
staff person. Staff train students in a variety of ministry skills and
insights. These ministry areas are well known and much training exists in
IVCF built around trying to help students grow in well-marked out areas:
evangelism, small group leadership, team leadership, relational influence
and discipling, cross-cultural ministry and multiethnicity. Staff tend to
perform an intuitive or unstated needs assessment every time they ask,
“What do my student leaders need to learn this semester to be more
effective in the ministry on campus?” Staff supervisors perform a needs
assessment when they ask the same question regarding their campus staff.
Yet if a system-wide assessment bias exists that assumes IVCF staff are
better trainers than they are, and assumes that the kind of training IVCF
excels at is the pinnacle of student ministry training, then an appraisal
that identifies training itself as a training need is not likely to result.
I believe such bias exists in IVCF. I begin with making a few assertions, not based on an objective
survey or study, but based on much familiarity with the kind of training
that IVCF staff receive, both as new staff and in on-going training
settings.

Needs Assessment: Training on Training in InterVarsity
So the place to begin is a needs assessment. A needs assessment begins with
the recognition of the gap between what exists and what is ideal,
recognizing that training is not likely to be able to fill the entire gap.

Ideally, this would involve a survey of some sort, asking staff supervisors
about the needs of their staff, as well as asking staff to self-diagnose
their own strengths and weaknesses in the area of training. However,
because of the organizational blind spots addressed above, a survey might
be unreliable. At any rate, I did not perform a survey, but sat down to
analyze what, in my opinion, are the needs of the organization on the topic
of training. As I move forward with this training in InterVarsity, I will
need to receive confirmation and further elucidation of the needs of the
organization in this area.

1. Student Training Time is Limited. One typical observation is that
students have less time for training than they used to, and are less
committed to recurrent training settings, such as weekly leadership team
meetings. Students evaluate their experience of training with a ruthless
cost-benefit analysis. Therefore, training must meet felt needs of
students. So our staff need to learn to address felt and real needs of
students as individuals, and not simply train toward skills that will help
students to accomplish the organizational mission.

A safe generalization is that students today are busier and under more
academic and financial pressure than ever before. When I graduated from
college, a year’s tuition, room and board at the private university I
attended cost about $8,000 year, or the price of a low-end Mazda car, which
I remember because I purchased one upon graduation for about that price.
Today, tuition, room and board for a year of private university is about
$40,000, which would enable a person to buy about 2 and one half Mazda 3’s.
With the higher proportional cost of university education, students have
taken on more debt, have tended to work longer hours, and have looked for
more demanding summer jobs and internships. College has become less of a
rite-of-passage (in which experiences are evaluated, among other things, on
the basis of their relational, social and spiritual enrichment opportunity)
and more of a ticket-to-entry, whereby every activity is seen as
developmental of the potential of the individual in terms that yield
interesting lines on a resume and dollars in future income. One implication of this assertion is that training needs to be
compact-high density. It needs to address the needs of the individual in a
way that yields a quick payoff. If the ecology of college life, as with the
rest of twenty-first century post-modernity, has fundamentally shifted
toward greater time scarcity and density, the training experiences we offer
students need to keep up. A second implication of this is that the intrinsic motivation for the
student trainees to learn must be made explicit. Since we cannot rely on
extrinsic rewards—grades, promotions-they way other academic/professional
growth opportunities can, the training must be seen both in its personal
and organizational/missional context-people need to know that they are
personally going to grow and that their investment will be fruitful toward
the mission. Very specifically, students need to know that the kind of
training that they get as leaders in InterVarsity will not simply help them
to be good role-fillers in InterVarsity (small group leaders, worship team
leaders, and so on), but it is designed as well to help them become better
at the kinds of relationships and pursuits students intrinsically value:
friendship, marriage, parenthood; being a good employee, colleague,
employer or supervisor. If we make this claim explicitly and often, and
then deliver on this claim, students will find the time in a time-
compressed ecology to benefit from our training, and this will redound to
fruitful campus ministry as well as transformed lives. Another way to put this, with clarity and as an important reminder to
staff, is that we don’t train students so that we’ll have leaders to carry
out the roles we need performed for our ministry. Rather, we invite
students into leadership with us so that we can train them and develop them
as people so that they’ll be such leaders and influencers their entire
lives long. Our reach-our hopes-for our students are far higher than simply
helping us to run our small ministry organization for a year or two.

2. Staff Prep Time is Limited. For several reasons, the time staff have
available to them training preparation is limited, and so excellent, high-
density training is comparably scarce.

. Staff self-limit their prep time. Staff tend to undervalue preparation for training in comparison with other ways they can spend their time. Most staff would rather be with students talking over coffee than sit in front of their computer developing a training session. Also, staff tend to view their preparation time for a sermon or large group talk as a much higher value (with more time allocated) than for a training session, even though it could be argued that a one-hour training session with 8 student leaders will have a greater and longer-lasting impact on the fellowship growth than a 40-minute talk given to 30 students. . The role of a staff worker is complex. Most Campus Staff Members are in their 20s, and often they are in their first full-time professional job after college graduation. They have been hired into a job that is more complex than a typical entry-level job, with greater autonomy and self-management required to be effective. The multiple demands of the job make the self-management required to think through and deliver high quality training difficult. . Staff have a reasonable and quick solution to the training need. If one valuable attribute of training is that it be interactive, involving more than just a one-way flow of information, our staff have a ready vehicle for this kind of training: a Bible study in which information is conveyed and attitudes are changed in a discussion format. I think indeed that this can be an effective tool in the training, but a Bible study in a training format has different attributes than a Bible study in a context where discipleship or community are the primary goals for the discussion. I’ll address this more below.
Therefore, staff spend less time (because they have less time, and also
because they perceive they need less time) to prepare for their training of
students than they might if these factors were not in play. This means that
high-density, high-quality student training is that much more difficult to
attain.

3. High Quality Training Skills are Rare and Mostly Intuitive. A number of
InterVarsity staff are gifted trainers-their training expertise usually
exists in some axis of campus ministry work, like evangelism, cross-
cultural mission, or leadership development. But even for gifted trainers,
their knowledge of what makes for good training seems largely intuitive, at
the level of “art” rather than at the level of “method”. Even excellent
trainers are not often excellent at multiplying their expertise in the
skill of training with other staff. Other staff, having been exposed to
their training, may want to replicate it, but without necessarily
understanding what made this training excellent vis-à-vis more routine
training to which they have been exposed.

Two implications of this assertion seem to be: 1) We need to help
people identify good training examples and to understand what makes good
training effective and memorable. Giving people a flexible structure for
effective training will help them as they are learning how to do training,
the way that giving early drivers specific guidelines for following
distances and parallel parking will help them develop safe driving skills
for a lifetime, even as the specific guidelines fall into disuse as the
driver becomes more skilled. “The teaching and learning of structure,
rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of
the classic problem of transfer… If earlier learning is to render later
learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of
which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made
as clear as possible.”[11]
2) We need to broaden the use of applicationally-oriented active training
approaches. Many different examples are helpful, but I promote Case studies
as a tool for active learning at the applicational stage.

Design Training Objectives for Training on Training
After a thorough needs assessment, the second step in instructional design
is to design training objectives that meet the needs as identified in the
assessment. It is helpful to recognize that the training needs to be
oriented around different types of goals, for individual trainees need more
than knowledge, as is seen in the needs assessment of InterVarsity.
Silberman (p38) refers to three types of learning as “ABC”:

. Affective learning: In InterVarsity, staff need greater motivation, both to understand the powerful developmental role of training of student leaders and to understand their role as trainers and the importance of, for example, quality preparation and thinking in advance of a training session. Staff may also need tools and lots of examples to overcome fear of the heightened leadership posture that being an active trainer would take. . Behavioral learning: Staff need skill in thinking beyond modeling, Biblical teaching, and one-to-one conversation as the primary ways for students to be influenced as leaders and ministers. Staff need practice at designing active training activities beyond Bible study discussion, such as role plays, case studies and games. Examples of this and invitations and opportunities to practice at the development of these activities will help to build the foundations for different behaviors. . Cognitive learning: InterVarsity staff need knowledge and insight about training and the learning process. They need the underpinnings of or the theory of training. They need to think deeply about the learning process, the skill development process, and the role that training has in both reinforcing modeling and helping refine skills through recurrent, on-the-job feedback and review. For the training on training that I have developed, I worked with
these three training objectives: 1) Build an understanding of an approach for training that is memorable and illustrative of the model. This is a cognitive learning objective, focusing on knowledge which will give them confidence in their training design and execution. 2) Give people specific tools needed either to build or to evaluate and use high-quality training designed by others. This is a behavioral learning objective, which will build skill in their training design. 3) Motivate staff to spend more of their work week preparing for and delivering high-quality training. This is an affective learning objective, focusing on developing an outlook that will increase the likelihood that staff take their training role seriously.
Beyond this training module, calibrated for a one-hour time frame (though
more realistically probably 75 minutes would be ideal), other training
objectives can be identified and further elaborated. Often in the design stage it is necessary to identify entry behaviors
that qualify or identify people who are the target audience of the
training. This ensures that the assumptions being made during the design
stage are appropriate for the group of people who will receive the
training. Otherwise, the training could end up either targeting too high or
too low for some participants to receive benefit, or targeting so broadly
that no one receives the optimum result from the training.

Develop the Training to Meet the Objectives
Once needs have been assessed and the objectives for the training have been
identified, it is necessary to develop a training program that will meet
the objectives. It should be possible to examine each of the objectives and
see how they are met by one or more elements of the training program, and
to examine each element of the training program and to see how it matches
up with one or more of the objectives. Ultimately, if training is added to
the design that does not meet any of the objectives, perhaps either that
element of the training needs to be eliminated, or the objectives need to
be revised in light of the training goals for that piece.

1) Build an understanding of an approach for training that is memorable and illustrative of the model. a. Memorable: 1) It is built off of a familiar model, the inductive model (Observation-Interpretation-Application), but it weds this familiar model to a new paradigm: Scripture-Paradigm-Case study. 2) It uses the striking quote from Archimedes about moving the world to help motivate efforts to produce high quality training. b. Illustrative: The training follows the same design as the model of the training I am trying to encourage: Scripture-Paradigm- Case Study. 2) Give people specific tools needed either to build or to evaluate and use high-quality training designed by others. a. Specific tools: Paradigms. By giving examples of a number of kinds of paradigms I am hoping to help staff recognize and develop them on their own, though I realize more staff will use other’s paradigms than will develop them from scratch. b. Specific Tools: Case Studies: While many more tools could be considered here for active training and applicational interaction, I felt that the single use and illustration of the Case study to be very generalizable and of immediate help to lots of staff. 3) Motivate staff to spend more of their work week preparing for and delivering high-quality training. a. Motivational: The training is meant to be motivational as it stresses the impact that a long lever of effective, multiplicative influence in the lives of students can have over the decades that those students live out the values built into them through the training and modeling of staff. b. My experience is also that the Case study workshop is itself motivational, because for most staff who have not written case studies, their experience of writing their first one is both a little frustrating but also gratifying, as within a few minutes they can gain insight and confidence that they indeed could do this again and use these case studies in their training.
The challenge of curriculum design is that, in the mind of the “active
trainer”, concepts that are full of life and potential can, without
constant vigilance, be put to paper in a way that robs them of their
energy, their vitality. To take a trainers’ insight, spoken energetically
with enthusiasm, and to write it down is almost to ground it, to drain it
of its electrical charge, to deaden it. The trainers’ notes are just that-
notes, not script; they are scaffolding, not stairs. They support the
structure, but the structure is the connection between the activities and
components of the training and the needs of the learners. Instructional
Design must be done well, but at some point, it must be walked away from,
in order to walk toward the semi-chaotic educational process that evokes
the spark of life and learning. This is a crucial component of education
and training that cannot be reduced to its constituent parts, and in some
ways separates the crude practitioner from the craftsman. It is of this
that Rogers writes, I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING – the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his ‘cruiser’. I am talking about the student who says, “I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me.” I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: “No, no, that’s not what I want”; “Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need”; “Ah, here it is! Now I’m grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!”[12]
This is, then, the object of our quest. Instructional Design is a means to
ready the trainer to host the learner to the place where this discovery is
made.
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[1] InterVarsity also works with faculty members on the campuses on which
it works, but this work would not typically be characterized as “training”.
In order to simplify the discussion for the purposes of this paper, the
student population (which is the vast majority of IVCF’s ministry) is in
view.
[2] N. Dailey, “Adult Learning and Organizations” in Training and
Development Journal, 38, pp 66, 68.
[3] Even as I assert this, I must say that this has not been my experience
at APU in the MHOD program, where it seems each professor is fully informed
of the theory and practice of andragogy, and direct, one-way information-
flow lectures as the means by which information is communicated has not
been my experience.
[4] Mel Silberman, Active Training (SF: Jossey-Bass, 1998), p4.
[5] The summary of Knowles’ andragogical premises is taken from a paper on
Malcolm Knowles distributed by Professor Helm, author unknown, published no
earlier than 1994.
[6] Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: Litton
Educational Publishing, 1968), p. 45 as cited in Silberman, p7.
[7] Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1966), p67, as cited by Silberman, p7.
[8] One shining example of the use of multi-channel active training in
InterVarsity is in our missions training. IVCF staff have for decades used
games, simulations, and inductive activities to help teach principles of
cross-cultural adaptation and communication. It simply is not true that IV
staff have no experience of excellent active training design. But it is
true that, beyond this specific training setting, there is little momentum
for other kinds of training beyond the simple small group-large group
discussion illustrated in the examples of Jon and Carrie.
[9] I had another experience of this recently when I was asked to offer
training on training to a staff team of 40 staff, but I was told (late in
the process) that it was an optional training and only four staff had
bothered to sign up for the training, which we then agreed to cancel. The
other option that day was for training in public speaking, also optional,
and six staff were signed up for that.
[10] Rich Lamb and Cam Anderson, “Growing Strong Chapters”, Student
Leadership (Fall, 2005), p19-21.
[11] Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education (1960) p 12, As cited in
Smith, M.K. (2002) ‘Jerome S. Bruner and the process of education’, the
encyclopedia of informal education
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm. Last updated: January 28, 2005.
[12] Carl Rogers 1983: 18-19, Rogers, C. and Freiberg, H. J. (1993) Freedom
to Learn (3rd edn.), New York: Merrill as cited in M. K. Smith, (1999)
‘Learning theory’, the encyclopedia of informal education,
www.infed.org/biblio/b-learn.htm, Last update: January 30, 2005