Designing People-Based Learning Experiences
Click the ♥️ if this resonates.
We don’t have a shortage of learning, we have a shortage of learning that changes anything. We sit in rooms, listening and nodding. We take notes we may or may not revisit. For a moment, it feels like something is happening. And then we go back to our lives largely the same.
This is strange, if you think about it. Because most of us, especially if you are reading this, care deeply about learning all the time. We invest time, energy, entire periods of our lives into it. We read, we talk, we gather people together with the hope that something meaningful will shift.
And sometimes, it does, but not always in the ways we expect.
The learning experiences that stay with us are rarely the ones with the most content, they’re the ones where something happened between people.
I love to find myself in conversations that change how I see something. Or to share ideas and have others hold them, tell stories that fuel them, and turn them into more (especially now!). I love the lessons I am taught in the world that change the assumptions I hold. But they always involve something extra.
Over time, that contrast has become harder to ignore.
I’ve spent years co-creating rooms designed for learning, teaching adults in higher education over sustained periods of time, presenting research where clarity and precision matter, facilitating sessions with young people.
Some are designed to share ideas to think about for a moment. Others to change what people do next in the world ~ a thought, a plan, an act.
And that second kind, which is the learning that lingers, reshapes practice, moves with people, it doesn’t live inside a single session. It unfolds across moments.
Before. During. After.
Which has led me to a different question.
I used to think my question was: How do I run better workshops?
But now I think my question is: How do I facilitate learning experiences that people carry with them?
Because if the goal is learning that is sustainable and alive, then what we’re designing is something much bigger.
The Big Idea
The expert in the room isn’t the point ~ the room is the point.
That is my lesson lately in every gathering I’ve had the privilege of facilitating.
The most powerful learning experiences are built across the room, between people and through interaction, reflection, and shared meaning-making.
Learning is something we participate in, and once you start to see it this way, something shifts: A workshop is no longer the unit of design, an experience is.
There are four key design moves that aid in creating an experience that sticks.
