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Develop and Deliver Concepts– In conceptual learning, participants learn new skills when they are shown or told how to do something, rather than giving them the steps to perform a task, which is procedural learning. The advantage to conceptual learning over procedural learning is that the participant understands a concept that can be later applied to other tasks whereas a set of instructions might not apply exactly to another circumstance and can easily be forgotten. Remind the participants that understanding the concept is more important than memorizing a set of instructions or steps in a task.
Concepts can be built in such a way that enables participants to gain an understanding of new ideas. When developing and delivering concepts, you “tell them what you are about to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them”. The steps to effective concept building are Setup, Delivery and Follow-up.
Concept Setup: Before you can teach new material, you need to provide a context in which the concept might be appropriate. You determine what historical or background information that is relevant to the concept you want to deliver. State the problem or task clearly, use analogies if possible, give examples of the task or problem, state a possible solution and tell why and then build a transition to your concept delivery.
For example, when teaching participants about troubleshooting a computer that constantly freezes, you might want to stress the importance of preventative maintenance. You might tell them that a computer whose hard drive is fragmented results in slower machine performance and file errors contribute to application errors and machines that freeze. You then tell them that using Scan Disk and Defrag in Windows or Norton Disk Doctor and Speed Disk in Mac OS is a good place to start troubleshooting. You have just effectively set up the concept you are about to deliver.
Concept Delivery: There are several techniques to delivering a concept; Clarify the problem or task again by restating the problem using analogies and examples and giving relevant historical or background information. Once you are done giving them the new material, reinforce it by doing a hands-on exercise with instructions for completing the task.
In keeping with the frozen computer example, tell them how the operating system writes data to a disk, how over time, bits and pieces of data and files get scattered about on the disk, making it more difficult for the operating system to retrieve data and hence the machine responds more slowly. Explain that once a machine is compromised by slow operating system performance, machine hangs are more likely and hence file structure errors that result from a machine freeze happen. Explain that file structure errors further result in more freezes and file corruption and so on. Then give the participants a step-by-step exercise using the operating system utilities that clean up the machine and prevent the machine freezes.
Concept Follow-up: Follow-up involves summarizing the concept to bring closure to the new material presented. If the concept you just delivered is used to build the next concept, be sure to enable a smooth transition from one concept to another by linking where appropriate. This allows participants to see that there is a relationship between one concept and another.
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