Embedded Files
Dear Teacher Educator,
Picture this.
You are a teacher, assigned to attend a mandatory training session on pedagogy for children with special needs. You're not told what the session will cover or what you’re expected to learn. You know the topic is important, but since you don’t work directly with these children, it doesn’t feel relevant to you right now.
You endure the session with resignation and resentment, thinking about the eight hours of class time you’re missing—and the lesson plans you’ll now have to hastily revise to make up for lost teaching time. The resource person encourages you to participate in boilerplate activities. You take notes. You fill out a feedback survey. You receive a certificate.
You suspect you’ll soon forget these learnings as you're unlikely to apply these right away. You look around, it seems at least 30 others are thinking the same thing. Nothing has really shifted for any of you.
Learning interventions that don’t work are a waste of time. Designing and facilitating learning experiences is intentional and effortful—and likely to be in vain if either of the following questions go unanswered:
Who am I designing this learning intervention for? OR Who is consuming the intervention I’ve designed?
In this edition, we unpack the who—and why getting it right makes all the difference to learning effectiveness.
The Who is non-negotiable in learning design—and here, the who is teachers. Unpacking this requires acknowledging that teachers, and teacher groups, are inherently diverse. Sharing a profession does not make them homogeneous. Differences exist between individual teachers, within the same school, and widen further across subjects, grades, zones, districts and states.
The Who is readiness
The Who is readiness
The who reflects learners’ ambitions, confidence, emotional state, and willingness to engage with learning.
If teachers are not ready, or do not care, even the most well intentioned - well designed learning interventions will fail to achieve its intended impact. A broad understanding of your learner profile - age, social context, general work environment, motivations might be the difference between engaged and disengaged participant.
The Who is lived experience.
The who shapes the extent and depth to which new learning is understood and internalised.
Teachers draw on prior knowledge, beliefs, and lived experiences to make meaning of new ideas. They tap into their pool of experience to interpret new learning. Because of this, the same content can be experienced—and interpreted—very differently by different individuals and groups.
Attending to lived experience allows teacher educators make thoughtful choices about language, content, examples, and activities—so learning connects rather than alienates.
The Who is potential to realise the learning.
The who defines the extent to which learning can be translated into action. It determines learners’ ability, willingness, and capacity to assimilate new ideas and apply them in practice.
While learning can be an end in itself, teacher learning interventions often position teachers as key enablers of broader educational outcomes—most notably, student learning. Teachers are expected to internalise new learning and act on it, often within a short turnaround time.
Understanding teachers’ capacity—including time, resources, autonomy, and support—ensures that learning can move beyond insight to implementation.
Teacher learning often operates within tight system constraints—fixed schedules, formats, and frequencies. Yet even within these constraints, there is room to be intentional about what is within our influence. Creating or asking for a participant profile may feel impractical or like extra work. But it forces a critical pause: what matters more—the learning activity, or the learning outcome?
Here's a quick checklist
Who is this intervention for, and what do I know about the group of participants?
What do they already know or believe about the skill or knowledge to be learnt?
Why does this learning matter to them now?
Even partial answers shape better design and facilitation. At scale, they provide a starting point to adapt and redesign—so the who is not lost in the process.
You have come to the end of this edition!
Thank you for engaging!
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse