Visit with Calhoun Wick

Last week I had the opportunity to visit with Calhoun Wick, author of the book The Six Disciplines of Break Through Learning. Cal is also the winner of Will Thalheimer’s Neon Elephant Award which Cal received in 2006.

Cal is the founder and CEO of the Fort Hill Company which specializes in Follow-Through Management™. The “Big Idea” of Cal is that training doesn’t stop after the course or e-learning module is delivered, instead, it is just beginning. (like all big ideas, the beauty is in the simplicity of the idea and the “rub” is in it’s execution.)

To streamline the execution, Cal and his company have created tools to continue the accountability for learning and for sticking to those “learning action items” well beyond the class session. We had a great discussion and Cal indicated that the problem with the ADDIE model of instructional design is that it focuses only on the training and ends basically after the training or learning event is concluded. There is rarely any follow up or follow through.

What Cal and his company have done is to create tools to facilitate and drive the follow up process. These tools are well designed and encourage a person’s learning peers to hold each other accountable for applying what they learned in a class to situations on the job. If you say you want to delegate more effectively, you rate your delegation growth every week and your peers provide encouragement and feedback on your progress. It is a powerful and effective method of extending learning beyond the four walls of a classroom or the confines of a single e-learning module.

The concept also reaches beyond ADDIE and forces designers of instruction to think about a learning process instead of a learning event. Powerful stuff.

If you get a chance, go hear Cal speak and, at the very least, check out his book on the subject of the six disciplines and think how you can transform your learning events into learning processes.

Addition: I have blogged some simple ideas for extending the classroom at TrainingDay Blog: Think “Learning Process” Not “Learning Event
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