Warm-up: Meet each other

In cross-team breakout rooms (3–4 people), introduce yourself:

• Who are you?
• Who are you training?
• What skill or topic?
• Where do things stand?

7 minutes

What are you most uncertain about?

Take 1 minute to think silently.

Then we'll hear from 3–4 people.

Today's arc

We're working from the outside in:

1. The system your training lives in
2. The people you're training
3. The outcomes you're designing for
4. The activities that get learners there

Everything today uses your own training.

Training lives in a system

Think of a training that didn't work — yours or one you attended.

What went wrong?

Was it the content… or something around the content?

It's rarely just the content

Your system map includes

• Actors — who is involved, directly or indirectly?
• Resources — what do you have to work with?
• Constraints — what limits what's possible?
• Connections — how do these elements influence each other?

You started mapping these in the pre-work. Now you'll build on that together.

Exercise 1: System Map

10 min · Own-team breakout

• Compare your individual system maps from the pre-work
• Build a shared version — fill gaps, challenge assumptions
• Push beyond the obvious:

• Who affects the training after learners leave?
• Which resources are fragile?
• What connections did no one spot alone?

Exercise 1: Debrief

One team presents their system map highlights

• Screen-share or talk through it (2 min)
• Everyone else: "What's missing? What connections do you see that the team might not?"

How does training lead to change?

A friend was made to take a Python course at work. She's not a programmer, but Python could genuinely help her be more efficient.

The course didn't land. No changes were made.

Her entire department has been through multiple Python courses — none have changed how they work.

Why?

The theory-of-change chain

Five links in the chain

• Inputs — resources you invest (trainers, materials, time, tech)
• Activities — what participants do during training
• Outputs — tangible things produced (a finished exercise, a working script)
• Outcomes — changes in behaviour or practice after training
• Impact — the broader change training contributes to

Every arrow hides an assumption

The chain looks logical. But what has to be true for each link to lead to the next?

That's what we're going to hunt for.

Exercise 2: Theory of Change

Phase 1 — Build your chain

10 min · Own-team breakout

• Start from Impact and work backwards
• Impact ← Outcomes ← Outputs ← Activities ← Inputs
• Get the chain on screen — one person sketches while the team talks
• Aim for a first draft that's concrete enough for someone else to read

Exercise 2: Theory of Change

Phase 2 — Hunt for assumptions

6 min · Cross-team breakout

• Each person walks others through their team's chain
• Reviewers focus on the right-hand side — outcomes and impact
• Ask: "What has to be true for this step to lead to the next?"
• Name the assumption you think is weakest

This isn't a competition — fresh eyes spot what insiders can't.

Exercise 2: Debrief

One reviewer: share the weakest assumption you found.

• Why is it fragile? What could break?
• Together: what would we change in the design to reduce the risk?

Know your learners

We were teaching basic web development to women online. The instructions said "open a text editor" — and many participants didn't know what that meant.

We hadn't met the learners up front. We'd aimed at one level of computer literacy. A different audience showed up.

We spent weeks reworking content that could have been right the first time.

Four questions to sit with

Take 2 minutes of silent thinking before we go to breakout rooms.

1. What do your learners already know or do that your training can build on?
2. What is the single biggest barrier to their participation or success?
3. What does "success" look like from their perspective — not yours, not the funder's?
4. What else do you know about your learners as humans — what do they worry about, struggle with, or juggle?

Exercise 3: Learner Reality Check

10 min · Own-team breakout

• Work through the four prompts together
• Focus on prompts 2 and 3
• Key question: "Is that barrier something your design can reduce, or a condition you need to design within?"

Exercise 3: What barriers came up?

Name the most common barrier type your team identified.

How people actually learn

Three principles that should shape every design decision you make.

1. Cognitive load

Your learners' working memory is smaller than you think.

• People can hold ~4 new items at a time
• Intrinsic load — the genuine challenge of the material
• Extraneous load — confusion caused by your design

Your job: reduce extraneous load so learners can focus on what matters.

2. Retrieval practice

Learning happens when people pull knowledge out, not when you push it in.

• Recognising an answer ≠ being able to produce it
• Apply knowledge in a new context → deeper memory
• The struggle of retrieval is the point, not a sign of failure

3. Social learning

People learn by talking, arguing, and building on each other's ideas.

• Explaining something to someone else deepens your own understanding
• Peer challenge surfaces gaps you didn't know you had
• Structure matters — "discuss in groups" is not social learning

Quick show of hands

Who has heard of learning styles?

Who here is a "visual learner"?

Who is an "auditory learner"?

The learning styles myth

If you're an "auditory learner," could you learn to drive a car by listening to someone talk about it?

If you're a "visual learner," could you learn to play guitar by watching videos?

The evidence doesn't support matching instruction to styles.

What works: varying how you engage learners — because different activities build different kinds of understanding.

Vague vs strong outcomes

Outcomes describe what learners will do, not what the training will cover.

Exercise 4: Learning Outcomes

Phase 1 — Draft

7 min · Own-team breakout

• Draft 2–3 learning outcomes for your training
• Checklist for each outcome:

1. Is it observable?
2. Does it use an action verb?
3. Is it realistic for your learners?

Exercise 4: Learning Outcomes

Phase 2 — Cross-team critique

8 min · Cross-team breakout

• Read out your team's outcomes
• Others check:

1. Could you observe a learner achieving this — how would you know?
2. Is any outcome actually a topic description disguised as an outcome?

Note revisions as you go.

Exercise 4: Debrief

Who has a before-and-after?

Share an outcome that improved through the cross-team critique.

Exercise 5: Start Designing an Activity

Phase 1 — Design

15 min · Own-team breakout

Pick one learning outcome from Exercise 4. Design an activity that helps learners achieve it.

The six-component template

1. Objective — which outcome does this address?
2. Instructions — step-by-step, clear enough for another facilitator to run
3. Materials — what do learners need?
4. Time — how long, broken into stages
5. Output — what do learners produce? (something concrete)
6. Participation — how is everyone involved, not just the confident ones?

Start with 1, 2, and 5.

Exercise 5: Live share

Phase 2 — Discussion

15 min · Whole group

• 2–3 teams walk through their emerging design (3–4 min each)
• After each share:

• What's strong about this design?
• What would you want to think through further?

You've started something real

You don't need to finish it today.

The workbook's six-component template is there for when you pick this up again.

The point was to experience what it feels like to design from outcomes, not from topics.

Exercise 6: Learner Experience Audit

Stretch — included if we're ahead of schedule

10 min · Cross-team breakout

Audit a flawed training segment against three questions:

1. Where would learners feel overwhelmed — material's fault or design's fault?
2. Where are learners passive for more than 10 minutes — what could they do instead?
3. Where could learners learn from each other — what structure would make that work?

Agree on 2 concrete improvements.

Exercise 6: Harvest

What improvements did you find?

Which of these problems do you recognise in your own training designs?

Closing reflection

Each team, answer one question:

"What is one thing you will do differently in your next training design because of today?"

Where to go from here

• The workbook goes deeper on every topic we touched today
• Activities you didn't get to — the workbook has them
• Part 2 covers facilitation, iteration, and opening your materials

The goal today was not to master all of this — it was to see the full picture and find the parts that matter most for your work.