Social Media and the Brave New Classroom

Social Media and the Brave New Classroom
By Jim Sullivan, CEO Sullivision.com
Teaching is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. –W. B. Yeats

I’m a teacher by nature, nurture and choice. And lately I’ve been seriously concerned about the state of training in the foodservice industry. When you 1) assess the creative new teaching methods being used in progressive middle schools, 2) witness the dynamic training being deployed in competing industries and 3) research the collaborative learning potential of both social media and Web 2.0, you get a sickening sense that we’re falling far behind in the race to engage the best and brightest young people. So allow me to address the possibility of creating a learning environment in which trainees teach, trainers learn, everyone collaborates and continuous curriculum improvement is done LIVE as the course is being taught--not in its wake.

Welcome to the Brave New Classroom.
For nearly 500 years--since the first days of the Gutenberg press--information and media has been exclusively linear and hierarchal. Content was designed by the creator and consumed by the student. The consumer (student) had slight or considerable additional insight on the subject but had limited or no options for contributing to or improving upon the creator’s (trainer’s) content, short of writing a letter. The first iteration of the Web 1.0 (1995-2005) was also a one-way medium; massive amounts of content were created for consumption, not collaboration.

But today’s Internet (so-called version 2.0) has reversed five centuries of information delivery and become a robust dialogue instead of a monologue. The web is now a conversation, where creators and consumers interact, collaborate and continuously update or improve content in real-time (e.g. Wikipedia).

The iPod generation’s internet experience drives its world-view. So it’s not much of a stretch to presume that workforce training is also fair game for creator/consumer collaboration. As author Clay Shirky has pointed out, prior to the Internet, the last invention that had any real impact on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. An apt metaphor for our industry since the table resides at its heart. And maybe that’s what the Brave New Classroom is: a place where training is a conversation, not a lecture; a dialogue, not a monologue, a place where you learn what you need and share what you know.

When you consider the widespread appeal of Social Media among our team members (84% of young adults between 19 and 21 are “active” users of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter et. al.), you begin to understand the cultural and paradigm shift that’s occurring. The newest generation of learners/trainees are not content to merely consume; they also want to produce, contribute and share. So why not leverage and replicate that behavior in the adult classroom in order to re-invent the process? If the web is now a conversation, why can’t training be too?

This new perspective is disquieting to many trainers because it falsely threatens their hierarchy, command, and control. Yet the common arguments against involving the trainee in content creation and critique are the paltry “We know better than you” or “We earned the role of teacher so listen up.” This paternalistic approach and mindset is dangerous in a business where nearly 70% of its employees are under the age of 25. While the notion of allowing the student to contribute to, be critical of, or improve upon, training content may sound foreign or threatening now, this is not something industry will grow out of, but rather something it must grow into. The conversational Web is not just making training better, it’s enabling a better way to train.

Here’s the thing, when you train to a process all thinking stops. Our young crew members don’t want steps to memorize, they want problems to solve. We need to teach them how to think and not just tell them what to do. We need to involve the trainee in the training process as it unspools, not just afterwards in a lame “evaluation form.”
Ironically the notion of letting the trainee design the training is not new. Fifteen years ago, (pre-Internet as we know it,) I learned that the best way to train waitstaff in a restaurant is to have them train me. It was standard procedure then to require servers at our restaurants to memorize lists, steps or stages of service and selling. Problem was, service wasn’t improving and sales weren’t increasing, but the lists got memorized. It was then I had the epiphany: creating a “10 Steps of Service” list gives the illusion we’ve applied procedural uniformity to a process, but the truth is that service-giving and menu merchandising is a complex experiential act, not a sequential one. Getting customer interaction “right” requires thought, assessment, adaptation, intuition, experience and customization. Assigning steps of service was like giving someone a boat to drive down the highway. Right concept, way wrong vehicle. So one fateful day I ditched my steps-of-service flip charts, exchanged “classroom-style” seating for tables and divided the waitstaff into random groups of five. I told them that our restaurant had two daily goals; 1) every guest leaves happy and 2) every shift is profitable. I then gave them a total of nine minutes to identify all the ways we could please guests and either save money or make money each shift. Wow. Was that an exciting nine minutes! The collaborative lists they came up with were more creative and practical than our “steps,” and since valuable experience was shared at each table through the discussion, it was highly prized. Plus, I learned that day that people never argue with their own data, and our servers were actually using what they taught each other and both service and sales measurably improved. This to me was akin to Enlightenment; I had taught them how to think, and they showed me what to do. I forever abandoned the dull “Tell-Show-Do-Review” process of training that is endemic in our industry and carves the passion, patience and performance out of both trainee and trainer. Failing to engage employees with your training program is costly in terms of wasted time, resources and customer dissatisfaction. When you explain to employees what you’re trying to do, rather than just assigning memorization, making demands or delegating tasks, you can build trust. And trust is the tinder that lights the fire of learning in motivated people.

Fast forward to 2011. For my generation, our interface with training largely mirrored our experiences with school: we were the audience, and someone twice removed—not the teacher but the textbook author--was the content creator. The chapters were written, the content asynchronous and chronological; the outcome pre-determined. It was presumed the creator knew best how to teach. But they didn’t always consider how people like to learn. Still, my generation sucked it up and took it, first in school, then at work, despite the fact that on-the-job experience exposed wholesale gaps and outright lies in the training curriculum. The only “interaction” we ever saw in formal training sessions was when the trainer randomly scheduled a group discussion in order to stifle yawns and to break up--rather than complement--the monotonous curriculum.

My kids and our current team members have quite different expectations today relative to learning; they see no reason why they can't be consumers, creators, and curators of a customized learning experience. The way they use the Web often entirely revolves around content that they and their friends have created, and within Web frameworks or scaffolding that facilitates that creativity instead of merely providing the content for them. They build profile pages, upload photos and videos, and interact both with each other and the content through active commenting systems. What’s old is new again.
Our company is currently adapting this new collaborative learning process into the training program of a large foodservice chain. We’re marrying employee learning styles to social media in a training program designed and delivered by the trainees themselves. The “teacher” is no longer the trainer; the process is. As a facilitator leads the live group discussion on a particular topic, one screen displays Power Point, the other a live Twitter feed from the audience members that adds nuance, insight, opinion and shape to the curriculum itself. It’s like a book whose ending is being written live. It takes a very unique facilitator to lead the discussion, but what a discussion it is. You start with a framework and the class rewrites your training manual in real time. McLuhan was right: the medium is the message and we’re talking training by tweets. But the bottom line is this: I’ve never seen a more engaged and enthusiastic group of 20-somethings in my life. We’re surely onto something here. Training that is aimed at you but doesn’t include you is pointless, worthless, and expensive. Stop telling, start involving.
If you still define a “hard drive” as a trip to the in-laws, you’re probably waiting for e-learning and social media training to go away and the three-ring binder to make a spectacular comeback…in a stagecoach.
Of course, there are the naysayers. My brother thinks that all social media is a fad, the flagpole-sitting/goldfish-eating of the 21st Century. (In all fairness, though It should be pointed out that in 1995 he also characterized the Internet as “sporting all the thrill of short-wave radio combined with pen pal letters.”) Despite the plethora of current non-believers, using the Internet in general and social media in particular to engage and even train our team is not the sort of thing that our industry will grow out of, but rather something it will grow into.
Embrace the inevitable. Make trends work for you. This transformation is not a choice.