Page 82 - OHS, June 2020

ADULT LEARNING
What Safety Trainers Need to Know about Adult Learning
There is one major reason why safety training fails to stick: knowledge transfer.
BY PANDORA BRYCE
78 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2020
www.ohsonline.com
Safety training’s biggest problem can be summed up in two words: knowledge transfer. An abundance of teaching points are crammed into every lesson, but all too often, relatively little learning actually happens— and there’s even less retention in the weeks follow- ing the training.
There are numerous reasons why safety training fails to stick. Lack of trainer skill is a major problem. Not everyone is willing to put in the time it takes to be effective at presenting in front of a group of people, and even experienced trainers can struggle to reach their audience. Another common issue is the avail- ability and appropriateness of training resources. Outdated videos and graphics can distract from the training content, and countless training groups have succumbed to death by PowerPoint.
But these challenges are dwarfed by the fact that relatively few people in charge of safety training have
a solid understanding of how knowledge should be transferred from teacher to student, or the funda- mental differences between young students and adult learners. A well-designed course can overcome most limitations, but even Hollywood-grade training vid- eos and PowerPoints will fail to work if the teaching methods are ineffective.
If EHS professionals want to improve the efficacy of their training sessions, they would do well to pay attention to best practices from the adult learning in- dustry. There are several lessons that translate from educational textbooks to industrial adult learning environments like safety training. And it starts with what a safety classroom should—and shouldn’t— look like.
Training environment
Safety training tends to replicate the situations in which the trainers themselves were educated. This typically means that training sessions look a lot like school classrooms. One of the problems here is that most safety trainers in workplace environments likely were not taught with adult learning pedagogy. Even if trainers did not enjoy their time in school, many of their assumptions about how to teach will come from their own educational experience.
One of the challenges that stem from re-creating old classroom structures is that some adult learners will perform especially poorly if their training feels like school. Often, adult learners are anxious in new learning environments, and school-like environ- ments can bring back memories of everything they dislike about formal education. In cases like this, roadblocks to learning are inadvertently erected be- fore the training even begins.
This issue can be exacerbated when a trainer de- livers a safety lesson as if it were a eulogy. All too often, teachers think that all types of learning, and safety in particular, have to be serious. As a result, they miss out on the value of a loose and fun class, where jokes, camaraderie and game elements can go a long way in engaging adult learners. This in turn helps them to remember the content. It’s ironic, be- cause the whole point of safety training is to prevent injuries and fatalities—but by delivering it in a way that’s as serious as the subject matter, trainers will likely fail to transfer the knowledge that workers need to avoid getting hurt.
With that said, effective learning design goes well beyond presentation skills and the classroom environ- ment. Tapping into motivational sources, engaging in
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