Choosing Your Delivery Methods

Role play
Now it’s time to determine what methods you will use to deliver your presentation. We will be beginning by covering basic delivery methods. Once we have a good foundation and grasp on the basic methods we will delve into more advanced methods.

Basic Methods

• Lecture: If you must lecture occasionally, use strategies to make the delivery more interactive.
• Discussion: A discussion facilitated by the presenter can be rich in interactivity.
• Small Group learning experiences: A small group experience provides direction toward specific learning goals, and provides a high degree of participant involvement.
• Dyads (Groups of 2). Using pairs provides unlimited options for simple interactive experiences. You can say, “Turn to the person on your right and…” Using dyads manages the attention span, the extent of influence, and the focus of the goal. The learning experience is relatively intimate.
• Triads (Groups of 3).  Trios expand the focus and experience opportunities. A measure of intimacy is still retained, but multiple viewpoints can be contributed. Triads are useful for producing definitions, establishing priorities, or providing an ongoing support system.

Case Study: The case study method is the presentation of detailed information about a particular situation, often problem solving. Case studies can be very creative exercises, and they are well-suited for small groups.

Here are six guidelines for developing a case study:

• Determine the principle you wish to have the case emphasize
• Establish a situation that demonstrates the principle
• Develop appropriate symptoms
• Develop the characters
• Write the case
• Provide questions to guide the learners as they process the case study to solve a problem.

Advanced Methods
After you feel comfortable with basic delivery methods, you can begin to explore some of the more challenging ways to present and facilitate learning experiences.Role play: Role playing allows participants to act out a behavioral role. This exercise — done with small groups or the large group — allows members to expand their awareness of varying points of view, and provides an experiential learning opportunity. A role play can be used in several ways; to solve a participant problem, clarify or sharpen an issue, or demonstrate a skill approach to a task. Importantly, it gives people an opportunity to practice a skill or approach in a safe environment and use the experience later on the job.

Here are several tips for managing a role play exercises:

• Obtain volunteers, rather than making assignments
• Use role play later in the training session, when participants know each other better
• Select low-threat situations, such as a work group holding a staff meeting.

Problem solving: Problem solving experiences are increasingly popular in training presentations because they allow participants to gain “real world” experience that often provides direct transfer back to the job.

There are three phases to a problem solving exercise:

• Defining the problem and generating data about it
• Generating potential solutions
• Selecting an implementing a solution.

Basic Criteria to Consider
A training presentation may use any combination of delivery methods as long as the net result is to achieve learning outcomes — and consider organizational requirements and constraints.

The four-step process below will help you select the best training delivery options to meet your training needs:

• List all possible learning methodologies that could be used to achieve the session objectives
• Identify possible delivery options for the learning methodologies
• Identify the organizational, presenter, facility, and resource parameters and their impact on the delivery options.
• Recommend your delivery strategies.

At a bank, the outcome of the process might look like this: