Reasoning Questions

Our ToC delivery style is based on reasoning questions. These reasoning questions use a form of deductive reasoning to help your learner(s) in your training session come to a conclusion based on either current or previous knowledge and understanding, how the reasoning question was phrased, and sometimes a bit of both. It is designed to keep your learners’ brains interested and processing. 

If we don’t keep our brains active, they will start to switch off. Think of it as how a PC will go to sleep if it is not used. We believe that’s precisely how our brains work in terms of engagement.  That is why our approach asks that trainers avoid giving a lot of information or lengthy explanations, but instead, use cleverly designed questions to maintain active, alert, and curious brains and keep those cogs turning throughout the learning. 

The reasoning questions keep your learners’ brains engaged by making them think through the questions being asked and reasoning out the answer. They help the brain do what it is good at: working things out for itself. This also generates interest in what is otherwise considered a boring topic.  

To ensure we do not make our learners feel under pressure to get the answer right, we use hints and tips within the questions to help guide their thinking. Apart from the hints and tips, we also employ a technique to help the learners’ brains realise that they do not have to get our questions right, but instead, that we are only asking for their opinion. 

Our approach means that instead of the usual approach to transferring new Skills, Knowledge and Understanding (SKU), such as the instruction-based approach (do this, do that) or the explanation-based approach (think this and think that), our approach helps your learners almost teach themselves through the intuitive discovery of all that’s new. 

The Moccasin Approach®

During our courses, your trainers will also learn how and why we ask them to always employ Emotional Intelligence (EI) in the form of our Moccasin Approach®. It involves using a simple mindset and maintaining that throughout the session, course, or programme. 

The Moccasin Approach works by asking trainers to consider how things are for their learners constantly: how they are feeling, what their concerns are, and what things are like from their perspective (in their shoes/moccasins).  

Structure of a Training Session

We have a logical structure for delivering training sessions, which includes:

• Introduction ( the topic, objectives, process, benefits and previous experience).
• Interactive Learning (Delivering the learning through reasoning questions and activities).
• Monitoring (Recap/checking questions to check knowledge and understanding).
• Practice (To allow learners to practice the learning in a safe and supportive environment). 
• Test (An activity designed to check whether the learning objectives have been achieved).  
• Closing the session down. 

Writing Learning Objectives

As mentioned in our structure, we discuss and practice designing and writing objectives. Our objectives are referred to as Task-Based Objectives (TBOs). 

In our experience, most organisations use SMART objectives. Our TBOs have the same ingredients but only three elements. We think they are easier to write and measure. 

Facilitating SAS Feedback

Facilitating supportive, considerate and honest feedback is critical for maintaining relationships between trainers and learners. Our take on this is that feedback should ideally be facilitated rather than given. It will be no surprise to hear that we use questions to do this, and we’ll cover how this can be done in the sessions.