DESIGNING PARTICIPANT TRANSFORMATION
Create extraordinary participant experiences that transform and promote participant growth, capacity, and commitment to contribute.
ELEVEN ELEMENTS
1
Design Learning for a Global Landscape
Generate sophisticated high-engagement, science-based learning models appropriate for an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
Custom-design learning programs that adapt big-picture principles to local contexts, highlight cultural richness, and honor diversity.
2
build Learning Ecosystems and Networks
Recognize all the essential elements of a whole system approach to learning that includes business, government, and community.
Include all stakeholder viewpoints and perspectives, expert reviews and multiple tryouts to ensure each design successfully meets client needs and has participant “buy in.”
3
commit to exceptional Participant success
Embrace science, technology and art using best practices of adult learning to extraordinarily enhance the brilliance of participants.
Recognize that a learner is more than a passive recipient and is a multi- faceted being with powerful potential for collaboration, innovation, and exceptional contributions.
4
optimize learning platforms
Invent formats for learning that inspire creativity as well as practically address individual needs and aspirations.
Consider synergistic blends Of in-person and online training, coaching, and mentoring, including micro-trainings, cascading trainings, and other virtual sessions that offer flexible platforms to clients.
5
Construct an architecture for transformation
Ensure that training is not “flat,” with only one level of knowledge, but includes ascending learning pathways to summits of higher intelligence and creative powers.
Build toward a transformational peak that offers new perspective for a shift in worldview and engages newly evolved brain capacities.
6
Create a Participant centered strategic learning arc
Conceptualize the overall learning journey based on key subject matter principles and on the needs and goals of participants as well as stakeholders
Ensure that the journey through the arc is fueled by passion and by a variety of enjoyable activities
7
craft brain-friendly scaffolding
Systematically increase learner expertise through attainable rises from a foundation to one capability after another.
Incorporate methodologies that engage various layers of the brain and integrate rational, innovative and emotional intelligence.
8
integrate learning into orchestrated session plans
Compose annotated agendas with interrelated themes, comprehensive overviews, and visual prompts ensuring that all players in the training perceive a coherent whole.
Include roles for social, artistic, constructive, dramatic players.
9
deliver training in harmonious, safe and fun learning environments
Arrange physical and social settings appropriate for the themes and methodologies that welcome participants and set a safe space for participation.
Build relationships that encourage trust, laughter and inspire creativity.
10
offer practical applications and celebrate accomplishments
Clarify how new acquired insights, competencies and attitudes can be retained for long-term use and immediately transferred to relevant situations.
Celebrate through ceremony and offer tangible as well as intangible recognition of accomplishments to acknowledge contribution and motivate further learning.
11
construct a heritage of learning wisdom
Cooperate with scientists, artists, technicians to make a quantum leap into more efficient, effective and worthy training models and platforms.
Enhance the qualities, values and wisdom of learning ecosystems to create a promising future for learners of all ages and economic status.
summary statement
Recent research suggests that Integrated Learning Systems, which use participant- centered design thinking, create extraordinary, synergistic results that can only be obtained with in-depth orchestration.
White Paper
Overview
ParCenTra’s high-engagement, transformative learning approaches have made an impact throughout the globe. Internationally and globally ParCenTra generates teams of star trainers and facilitators who, with creativity and expertise, enhance the scale and impact of both local and global training. This generation of trainers merges strong mastery of ideas with neuroscience principles, learning architecture, and creative activities. Learning in the hands of these trainers is not only successful, it is inspirational, enjoyable and has positive energy flow.
Using thematic archetypes appropriate to the designated culture, trainers build capacity and motivation to address pervasive issues. This approach is increasingly appropriate in an emerging world with strong needs for sustainable environments, regenerative economies, healthy climate, social justice, and inclusive cultures.
Context
The current challenges facing learners are extraordinarily complex and require a coherent big picture as well as skillful, innovative strategies for successful navigation. The architectural, multi-tiered learning models designed by ParCenTra make this complexity accessible through sophisticated learning approaches mapping the complexity and offering practical skills for navigation.
ParCenTra used this model in a series of International Small Business entrepreneurial training projects in Asia, Eastern Europe the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean sponsored by the World Bank and private corporations. In-country entrepreneurs were paired with World Bank regional consultants to adapt curriculum to local needs and audiences and to conduct trainings as participant-centered trainers.
This paradigm includes, and stretches beyond, the body of experience systematically built by scientists, researchers, educators, and professional trainers about how to positively engender learning. Technological advances are rapidly altering learning landscapes, making possible new dynamic interactions, but antiquated trainer-centered methodologies limited to telling, showing, questioning, discussing, and testing—still predominate. These overused methodologies are characterized as barrages of disconnected ideas presented without heart or art.
Sharing passion, wisdom, and spreading a creative message characterizes the zeitgeist of the early 21st Century. The ParCenTra paradigm supports the emergence of awe-inspiring, White Paper 2 intentional intelligence woven with symbolic art and energetic dynamics appropriate for deeply engaging and closely interacting with participants.
Learning model
The ParCenTra user-centered model is characterized by a structure or architecture that systematically engages multiple brain areas and leads to emergence of the highest capacities of visionary thinking. The content of the model includes skills of Learning Management, Coordination, Presentation, and Facilitation – all necessary to take a training from initial design through delivery to growth-oriented evaluation.
Learning Management: The trainer/leader as Learning Manager sets the stage for learning and encourages participants to participate actively and reach goals, including offering greetings, providing for comfort, arranging introductions, establishing ground rules, and negotiating schedules. Are participants welcomed into a comfortable, workable, visually enriched environment knowing why they are there, how they are related to other participants, and knowing what is expected?
Presentation: The trainer/leader, as Presenter, provides new information and ideas to participants by means of brief direct verbal, visual and interactive communication.
Facilitation: The trainer/leader, as Facilitator, assists participants to work together in groups to share ideas, solve problems, generate new ideas, and report out their thinking for the learning of all attendees.
Coordination: The trainer/leader as Coordinator, guides participant activities, and other events; monitors them and arranges for appropriate follow-up.
Each learning section in a training is presented with an architecture build of its own, including a Transition, Activation, a Warmup, Interactive Presentation, Discussion, Learning (Relevant Practice), and an Ending, and requires all the above skills.
These capabilities bring a neuroscience-informed architecture of learning to all meetings and events. We know that everyone has a spark of genius and with the new insights of neuroscience, we are much closer to activating the highest level of innovation in each person.