The Danish Beer Debrief

I’m a sucker for learning.

So, after running a workshop at a conference one morning, and enjoying a rather delightful spread of Danish food afterwards, I wandered into somebody else’s session for the afternoon.

It seemed like the smarter option: decompress, sit at the back of a room, learn something new, perhaps make a few notes. The alternative was going back to the hotel for a nap or sitting at the bar drinking a staggeringly expensive Danish beer, which was tempting but felt slightly unprofessional at one in the afternoon.

Or so I thought.

I’m always impressed that anyone takes to a stage at all. Standing in front of a room full of strangers and attempting to teach them over a few hours takes a real sense of purpose and a decent set of nerves. You are not simply talking at people, you are asking them to do things, speak to strangers, make decisions, expose what they don't know, potentially expose what you don't know and sometimes admit that they have no idea what you are talking about.

So this is one of the more careful pieces I’ve written, because the afternoon workshop I attended was, by any honest measure, a complete flop. Afterwards, the teacher found me, insisted on buying me one of those expensive Danish beers, and asked me to help her work out what had gone sideways.

Which, when you think about it, is a remarkable thing to do in itself. Most of us would have quietly scuttled out of the venue, returned to the hotel, stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes, lived inside speakers remorse for a while and decided never to mention the afternoon again. Instead, she turned the whole thing into a debrief.

What follows is a tidied version of the scrappy, beer-stained notes we made afterwards, shared with her blessing. She shall remain happily nameless, partly because there is nothing particularly useful in knowing who she is, and partly because the interesting thing about the afternoon was that very little of what happened was really about her. Not entirely anyway.

Let's lay down the start and finish first, so you don't think I'm being too harsh with the word flop. More than 120 people started the session. After the first break, roughly half of them didn't come back. After the second, shorter break later in the afternoon, three people returned. I was one of the three.

That sounds like the beginning of a rather brutal review of someone's teaching.

It isn't.

It is a story about rooms, numbers, attention, adaptation and the fact that teaching is one of those jobs where the conditions can change the job itself.

And it started before the teaching started.

The room is part of the lesson

Not all rooms are created equal.

This sounds obvious until you have spent enough time in conference rooms to see that a room is often treated as if it were a box: people are put inside it and then the important work begins.

But rooms have light, temperature, acoustics, furniture, sight-lines, exits, smells, noise, levels of comfort and personality. They affect how people behave before the teacher has said a word.

This particular workshop had been designed for around fifty people sitting at small tables, where they could talk to one another and work through activities together.

The room contained more than twice that number, arranged in lecture-style rows. There were no flipcharts. There was no microphone. There were no windows. The teacher had asked for a room with decent daylight and got something that felt rather like a holding cell in a secret service building. You can tell I'm working my way through Slow Horses.

It is easy to think this sort of thing is merely the teacher making unreasonable demands, like a rock star arriving with a rider that specifies a bowl of green M&Ms, three bottles of whisky and 20 white kittens and 100 doves. Yes, Maria Carey once requested this. The doves and the kittens I should add, not sure about the whiskey and M&Ms.

It isn't an unreasonable demand at all.

If you are teaching people in a room, the arrangement of the room is part of the teaching. If you want conversation, people need to be able to talk. If you want people to work together, they need to be able to see one another. If you want people to concentrate for several hours, the environment matters.

The room isn't the backdrop to the learning. It is one of the things doing the teaching. So, if you can, go and look at it beforehand.

The night before is ideal. The morning will do. Even a slightly frantic last-minute wander through it over lunch is better than discovering, at the moment you are supposed to begin, that your carefully designed interactive exercise requires thirty tables that do not exist and half the number of people than you have staring at you.

There is nothing glamorous about checking a room. It is simply one of those small acts of care that prevents much larger problems later.

Then there were 120 people

The second surprise was the number of people. The workshop had been designed for fifty. More than 120 turned up.

There is a wonderful but contentious moment at conferences when the organiser discovers that more people want to attend something than expected. There is often a short conversation, some mental arithmetic, a few quick discussions, a glance at the fire regulations and then the phrase, “Well, can we squeeze a few more in?”

A few more turned out to be seventy.

I've taught large groups before and it is perfectly possible to do it well, but it is a different craft. I once taught around this number myself and survived largely because several extremely capable people were running around behind me sorting out all the things that large groups make complicated.

A workshop designed for fifty people is not automatically a workshop for 120.

This is where the teacher has to be a little brave. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your participants is to tell the organiser that the room is full and stop at the allotted number.

It can feel awkward. Everyone is there. Everyone wants to come in. The organiser wants happy delegates (and more money). The teacher doesn't want to be the person standing at the door like a nightclub bouncer on a power trip.

But there is a deeper responsibility here.

People have given you their time, their money, their energy and their attention on the understanding that they are going to experience something. If you subtly, or not so subtly, increase the number, you have changed the thing they bought.

And there is no more finite resource in a room than attention, which is easily squandered when there are more than double the people in the room.

The interactive workshop therefore disappeared before it had really begun. The teacher had prepared a workshop. The room required a seminar. Those are not the same thing.

I happen to love seminars. There is something wonderful about a good person at the front of a room, thinking out loud and taking an audience somewhere interesting. Holding their attention, presenting with confidence and clarity, and bringing people through a well-designed topic.

But you need to know that is the game you're playing. And, ideally, you need to have prepared for it.

Then attention wandered off

This was where everything else started to make sense for her. Teaching is fundamentally an argument and fight for someone's attention. Without attention, no learning can happen.

The learner brings some of that attention with them. The teacher has to earn the rest and keep it.

And attention is fickle. It doesn't take much to lose it.

In this case, there was no microphone – she didn't think she'd need it for 50 people – which meant that a substantial part of the room couldn't properly hear what was being said. A few requests to speak up followed. Those requests are understandable, but they also change the atmosphere. The teacher becomes more self-conscious, the audience becomes more aware of the mechanics of the room, and suddenly everyone is thinking about the fact that they can't hear rather than the thing they are supposed to be learning.

The opening lost some energy. The first slides arrived with a slightly apologetic quality. People began to leave, mostly from the back where the voice wasn't travelling.

None of this was catastrophic on its own. That is the interesting bit. It's natural to lose some people. A room can survive a bad microphone. A teacher can survive a nervous opening. A workshop can survive too many people.

But small problems compound.

The planned variety of the workshop had now narrowed into a single mode: one person standing at the front talking to 120 people sitting in rows.

That can work brilliantly. But it asks rather a lot of the person standing at the front. You need a voice that carries. You need confidence. You need stories. You need questions. You need ways to bring attention back when it wanders. You need to read a room that is, in this case, the size of a small village.

And you need the willingness to change what you're doing when what you're doing isn't working. That last one is probably the hardest.

Teaching is a collection of tools

The thing I found most interesting about the afternoon wasn't what went wrong.

It was how many useful teaching tools had been removed from the teacher's kit before she had even started. Conversation had become difficult. Demonstration was harder. Practice was largely impossible. Comparisons between methods or approaches was difficult to organise.

The room was effectively asking her to lecture and she'd prepared to teach in a smaller group.

Which made me think about what good teaching actually consists of.

Conversation is one of the most powerful teaching tools we have, but conversation isn't simply allowing everyone to chat. A good question gives attention something to focus on. Dialogue reveals misunderstanding and nuance. A pause can tell you that people are thinking, or that nobody has the faintest idea what you just said. The teacher's job is to guide the conversation towards somewhere useful.

Then there is demonstration. Explanation is surprisingly fragile. Demonstration tends to stick. A demonstration really is worth a thousand words sometimes.

Show someone what good looks like and you've given them something to compare themselves against. This is one reason apprenticeships have survived generations of educational change and why on-the-job training is my recommended way of learning in the workplace. People often learn by watching competence before they can explain the theory, methods or approaches behind it.

Show it. Then talk about it. Then let them try. Pretty tough to do with that many people.

Which brings us to practice. Learning becomes much more interesting when people get to do something with it. A good exercise introduces a little friction. People make a choice. Something doesn't quite work. They discover why. They try again. This friction creates a reward on the other side – better understanding.

One well-designed exercise can be worth more than forty slides explaining how important the exercise would be if only somebody actually did it.

Then there is comparison, which is a slightly underrated teaching device. Put two things beside each other and people start noticing. Two approaches. Two examples. Two pieces of writing. Two designs. Two ways of handling the same problem.

Suddenly the trade-offs become visible.

Comparison doesn't necessarily give people an answer. It gives them something much more valuable: a way of developing their own judgement and taste.

And then, rather unglamorously, there is review. We tend to think that once something has been explained, learned, discussed and written down, the job is done. It isn't. Memory is often unreliable.

A short review at various stages throughout the workshop helps people retrieve what they have learned, notice what they haven't understood and connect the new material to what they already know. This is laddering on top of understanding. So, it pays not to go too far ahead without checking understanding is actually happening.

And running through all of these is story and visual material.

Facts explain. Stories give them somewhere to live. A good story can turn an abstract idea into something people remember because they remember where they were when they heard it. A good visual can make a complicated thing suddenly really rather obvious.

Both are really ways of managing attention. And attention is the gatekeeper. Nothing gets learned while attention is somewhere else.

The bit nobody can put on the slides

There is, however, a danger in turning all of this into a list of techniques.

Teaching isn't a checklist. It is a craft. Something I take great care to point out in Workshop Mastery.

Conversation, demonstration, practice, comparison, review, stories and visuals are not seven buttons you press in sequence until learning comes out. They are tools. And there are many more too. The interesting bit is knowing which one to reach for.

Plans matter, but adaptation matters more.

A rigid plan produces the rather bizarre sight of a teacher continuing to deliver Activity 4 because Activity 4 is next, despite the fact that the room is ready to walk out, or already has.

To have no plan is to invite chaos though.

The craft sits somewhere between the two. The best teachers I know are neither rigidly following a script nor improvising their way through the afternoon. They are paying attention.

They notice when people are confused. They notice when energy is dropping. They notice when a question has opened up something more interesting than the slide they were about to show. They notice when the room needs to move. They notice when the plan needs to be abandoned for now.

And they have enough different ways of teaching something that abandoning the plan doesn't feel like failure. It feels like teaching.

That, I think, was the real lesson from the Danish beer session.

The afternoon wasn't a failure because one person wasn't good enough at teaching. It was an example of what happens when a good plan meets a different reality.

The room was wrong. The numbers were wrong. The technology was wrong. The teaching approach therefore had to change.

And changing it is hard, particularly when you're standing at the front of 120 people and several of them are about to leave.

But there is something rather wonderful about teaching for precisely this reason. Every room teaches the teacher something. You learn which questions work. Which stories fall flat. Which activities take too long. Which explanations make people's eyes glaze over. Which examples make a room come alive, and which put them to sleep.

And occasionally you discover, as this teacher did, that a session hasn't worked. The useful response isn't to hide the evidence. It's to buy someone a beer and ask what happened.

I think about that afternoon rather fondly. Not because it was a great workshop. It wasn't. We both agreed on that. But because the teacher did something that good teachers do: she stayed curious and wanted to improve. She wanted to understand, to learn, to try again, to get better.

And perhaps that is where teaching and learning meet.

The teacher isn't the person who knows everything in the room. The teacher is the person paying particularly close attention to what is happening in it.

I hope the beer was worth it.