Decorate Your Training Room with Wallpaper. At first glance the title sounds pretty impractical. Why would you want to put wallpaper in your training room? It’s a pain to install. It rips easily. It tends to come in patterns apparently meant more for torture than decoration. Well, I don’t mean the traditional wallpaper we’ve all seen in our grandparents’ living room. I mean customized course wallpaper. Use that old reliable staple of the training room: flipchart paper.
I first discovered this little gem of a technique by accident. It was always a habit for me to stick the agendas of prior days on the wall during a multi-day course. I would also, occasionally, stick up some other key chart pages if I found myself turning back to them often. But one day, while the learners were out for lunch, I got quite bored waiting for their return. I had already reviewed my lesson plan for the afternoon. Searching for something to do, I decided to tape all the key chart pages to the wall, in the order they related to my learners’ jobs. The effect was dramatic. During the afternoon, learners were saying things like, “Wow, did we really cover all that?” and, “Is that ever handy!” or even, “Just look at the wall, the answer to your question is right there.”
Since that day, I always plaster the walls with key flipchart pages during my training. Even on a one-day course, I’ll end up with ten to twelve pages lining the room. Some types of content that end up there are:
- the agenda
- prioritized course objectives (based on their input)
- key words that convey the overall process (often some acronym)
- definitions of key terms
- illustrations of underlying structures of processes (flowcharts)
- the charts learners filled during brainstorming or other group exercises
I’ve found this idea really affecting my learners’ perceptions of the progress they’ve made. It also makes it easier for them to refer to key concepts in later exercises. And if you want to get technical, it helps people with varying learning styles assimilate the content. Auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners each use them in ways that match their preferred style.
There’s one downside here: It’s yet one more thing to stay on top of during the training session. But I’ve found it pretty easy to handle. Any time the learners are involved in an exercise or small group discussion, I have a minute to grab my tape and get wallpapering. Here’s a little tip to make cleaning up easier. Stick your tape vertically at each side of the flipchart’s top edge, rather than on a 45 degree angle over each corner. When it’s time to tear down, you just pull the flipchart paper away from the wall and it comes off easily.
As a testimonial to the effect of this little technique, I’ll share an occurrence I’ve seen a few times on my multi-day courses. At least half a dozen times so far, as the last day winds down, I’ve had learners line up in front of all the agendas on the wall and ask me to take a group picture. When people actually want the wallpaper in their group picture, it must be contributing something to the training.
Alan “The Tool Man” Magnan
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Encourage your students to take pictures OF the wallpaper. These days almost everyone has a device with them that can take pictures. That way they’ll have a quick handy reference to the material covered. Seeing it in that context will bring associated memories to mind and help with recall.
In fact, why not encourage them to make a scrapbook for their desk? Hmm….I’m going to use this in my next class. I’ll get some blank scrapbooks and craft items from the dollar store, snap the pictures myself and print them out for everyone! Yeah!
Thanks for sparking the idea!
Just a quick tip. Use Flip charts from 3M. Then you don´t need tape.
They are like poster size post-it. You can write on them on the wall and they can be moved.