Some may say that I started a second career ten years ago when I left the high school classroom and became a corporate trainer and eventual instructional designer. For me, I think of it more like a lateral move. Ok, maybe Tom Cruise’s swinging into a window a hundred stories up in a Dubai hotel room may be a more apt mental picture, but I see my entire career arc as having always been an educator.

I was born into a family of artists and musicians. I got a 98/2 split, heavy on the musician side. My award-winning sculptress grandmother tried to hide her disappointment, but I couldn’t draw a stick figure. So, musician, it was. However, we also had a teaching streak in us. It had only been suppressed by one generation, but from the time I picked my first trumpet, it was less than a day before I was teaching my neighbor how to play. The insatiable desire to see a student’s “light bulb” moment has been a driving force in me, even when I tried my hardest to suppress it.

And for 15 years, I was a band director and choir teacher and even dipped my toes into Civics and Economics. I have taught kindergarten (the toughest gig I ever had) through college as a grad assistant (same as kindergarten, but they think they already know everything). I found, though, whether, through a more expository lesson of teaching students about the 8th amendment or a guided-discovery methodology to teach the 8th note, some things remain consistent throughout learning styles and learning levels.

So here are three things I carried over from my years as a classroom and corporate trainer role into instructional design. Ask yourself these questions.

1. What is Your Learning Outcome Supposed to Look Like?

Whether you call them learning objectives, learning outcomes, or any other term, you should see the end result before you start, and then reverse engineer your teaching methods to meet the students where they are.

The reason why I would teach a lesson on staccato 8^th notes to middle school musicians was a means to an end. Sure, I wanted them to know how to articulate them, but the result was having them play those notes accurately in a concert or evaluation setting. The trick was not just to teach to the performance (we might say teaching to the test) but to teach the concept to apply to every situation. Now, one could get on their high horse and say you should never teach to pull a performance or check off a compliance box in the corporate world – and you would be right. But make no mistake, the motivation to do so also can and should come from a “performance” standard.

When designing a course centered around a particular skill set, perhaps how to enter I-9 information for new employees, you certainly want to teach specifically to the “test.” Can that employee also take that training and increase their intake volume and decrease errors? Of course! But what if you could also teach broader skills: problem-solving, proofreading, and maybe even process improvement? Yes, your objective may be to increase productivity and decrease error for this one process, but think what could happen if you could also teach skills that will transfer to other tasks! It’s a balance that you as a designer – as educators – can and should embrace, always keeping in mind not to let the scope creep too far, but if you think a little forward in your approach, you can accomplish more than just a few sets of outcomes.

2. Know Where Your Learners are Coming From

I was a contract trainer for Caterpillar when I started my corporate foray. I trained new assemblers and welders about some of the company’s goals for process improvement and minimizing non-value-added work from their load. But I also got to teach assemblers how to torque a bolt to a preset specification. What interested me was that some of these folks had been torquing long before I knew what a torque wrench was, while I had to teach others “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.” Such a wide variance of skill levels within the same learning group can be a significant challenge. On the one hand, rushing the newbie through training is a trainwreck (or, in this case, an excavator wreck) in the making. But you also want to avoid the eyes-rolling-back-into-their-sockets boredom from the experienced ones who just want to get to work!

In a classroom setting, it is pretty easy to identify these groups and use those experienced folks to help you tutor the less-learned ones. Giving them the task of teaching will keep them occupied, and, in my case, I learned a lot from them that I later used in subsequent training.

This ain’t so easy when designing an eLearning course, and you may have to tweak your system. However, one advantage you have is that your learners, who are most likely taking these courses asynchronously, can proceed at their own pace. This allows you to increase the tempo of a course to satisfy the veteran, as the rookie can slow their roll when needed. Yes, I know it is not that cut and dry, but knowing that you may have a vast range of learner experiences amongst your audience should factor into your approach.

3. Know How Your Learners Learn

In the aforementioned training gig, I was charged with teaching process improvement concepts to people who, by definition, learned with their hands, which was more challenging than one might think. The curriculum was supposed to be a three-hour lecture on my part based on – you guessed it – an insanely long power point presentation. Heck, I almost fell asleep the first few times.

I had to learn early that I needed to engage these groups in hands-on activities so that I would not prove to be the cure for modern insomnia. So I got creative. For a lesson on streamlining workloads between stations, I devised an assembly line for making paper airplanes. It also wasn’t lost on me that what would’ve gotten them into trouble in grade school, they were now getting paid to do! After teaching the “7 deadly wastes” concept, I handed them a most convoluted and imbalanced workload, guaranteed to disrupt good productivity. And as you would expect, after round one, a few planes got to be launched into the corresponding offices (for which I was chastised on several occasions).

However, I got them out of the passive learner mode and into something fun, different, and active. At the same time, they learned EXACTLY what I was trying to teach, but have a blast doing it!

So, as a designer, find out what kind of learners will make up most of your audience. Tactile? Visual? Aural? You will seldom find any learning audience that will be only one of these but do some digging. Consult with your SME and stakeholders as to what they do. How do they do it? Maybe even WHEN do they do it? An ounce of preparation here will bring better results. Guaranteed!