Bizarro World Training
Photo by Christopher Machicoane-Hurtaud on Unsplash
I was given an assignment to go over good student appointments on the phone protocols with my online faculty. This was one of those "somebody's done it wrong so we all need to be punished" training assignments.
I was pissed. My team was great on the phone. How did I know?
1. I trained them.
2. I observed them.
3. Better than #1 or #2, my team understood that our behaviors with students on the phone reflected upon all of us, not one of us. As the Disney song says "We're all in this together". You're welcome for that earworm.😛
So I was mad and didn't want to do the training. But I had 2 items in my favor:
1. We could design and run the training any way we wanted to. We only had to make "recordings" of the training.
2. My boss didn't care to check on the deets. He just wanted to hear that I had completed the training with my team.
So.... I decided to do Bizarro World Training. That is, the opposite of everything that should be done, we were going to do.
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash
I directed my team to team into teams of 2 and they had a certain amount of time to make a recording of "The worst faculty - student phone call ever."
They would make a recording - it could include video or not but everyone on the team had to appear at least once in a recording, being either the faculty or the student.
We would watch all of the recordings at one team meeting one week.
The results were PERFECT.⭐
I had faculty who started the video literally with her feet up on her home desk, doing her nails. She just casually called a student. She was completely oblivious to the student's needs and had not prepared at all.
Another faculty gave off-the-cuff advice, dismissing everything that the student thought *might* be important and just said things like "yeah, whatever!" It was like the most un-clued-in faculty member ever.
But the winning entry was a faculty member who called a student and they arranged for massive interruptions by their kids during the phone call-- on both ends. The student threatened their kids on the phone. Yes as online faculty we hear that a lot "If you don't quiet down, I'm gonna [insert true reason to call DFS on the student]!"
But that was not all, the faculty member's kids broke into the call too, explaining things they were excited about and playing the violin right next to the phone.
The call devolved into just a cacophony of the faculty member and student yelling at each other to barely be heard.
We were all dying of laughter, tears streaming out of our eyes, when we finished with this training.
I kept the recordings and used them to train new faculty.
Always with the qualifier, "Here's how NOT to do it."
#SomeOfMyBestTrainingEver
#training #elearning #OnlineLearning #faculty #leadership #edtech #InstructionalDesign #BizarroWorld #WhatHappensWhenYourLeaderIsAnInstructionalDesigner
Article also posted to LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bizarro-world-training-heather-elizabeth-dodds-ph-d-