Leadership Training Chapter 4 – Common Ground

Chapter 4 – Common Ground

An Education Conundrum:

“It is impossible for a trainer to teach a student anything unless both the trainer and the student already know it.”

If that is true, it may seem like, “what’s the point” of training if the students already know the material, but that’s the key to the whole thing. In order to communicate with somebody there has to be some level of common ground. The student and teacher must be on the same page in order for knowledge to be transferred.

I use this example in scuba diving education and it is very simple. I want to talk about something called bubble mechanics. If I start a class talking about bubble mechanics to a new diver and I talk about Boyle’s Law and gas expansion and the way inert gasses process through the body and exit the body by various levels of profusion and then there is the surface tension on the bubble and the dual phase decompression model we use for both dissolved gas and the bubble model and what the student hears is: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bubble, blah, blah, blah, bubble, blah, blah, bubble blah, blah, blah blah, bubble…” but understands nothing.

So in order for me to have a conversation with a student about bubble mechanic the first thing I have to do is find something that student understands. Then I can move forward.

• “Do you know anything about bubble mechanics?”
• “No, never heard of it.”
• “All right, do you know what decompression illness is?”
• “Not really.”
• “All right. Do you know what the bends is?”
• “Oh, yeah, yeah. I know the bends. The bends is what my mom told me I’d get if I jumped in the pool within an hour of eating.”
• “Okay, great. Let’s start with the bends.”

Now we have something we can both talk about that we’ve heard of. We have some common ground. So now we start moving this forward.

“What is the bends? The bends a slang term for something called decompression illness. What is decompression illness? Decompression illness is a diving injury caused by bubbles becoming lodged in your bloodstream on ascent. Okay, why do the bubbles form on ascent and how to you manage them? That’s bubble mechanics.”

Just this short, 30-second conversation gets a student to a point where he or she at least understands what bubble mechanics means. This gives us the ability to start to slowly talk about the more scientific parts of what happens to these bubbles of gas when you scuba dive, and that is the process of creating common ground.

If you ignore common ground, if you start at the end, if you tell a student everything you know about a topic thinking that they are actually going to grasp it, you are doing what we call “fire hose education” – the information comes flying out faster than anybody can catch it.

As you are working through any topic – scuba or flying or software or manufacturing…anything – you must look at the end goal. What can you present about your topic that everybody will have some connection to? Use that common ground to move to the next level, and that common ground to move on, and so on.

Blended Education

One of the interesting things about blended education – combining online training with live training – is how we can create common ground. Online education is not the most effective way to completely train someone, but it does have some benefits.

One of the benefits is it exposes your trainees to a lot of jargon. Jargon is an education killer. If you start talking in jargon, using words and phrases your trainees do not understand, they are instantly distracted, “I wonder what that was? I wonder what that means? Let me think about that. I don’t really know what that means. Oh, well, I’ll ask him later.”

And all of a sudden that student just lost minutes of class time by a simple distraction.

Pre-education, or online education before a live class, does a great job exposing students to jargon and getting them to a point where at least they recognize some of the terms you are going to use, helping to eliminiate distractions.

Connecting a trainee to jargon is one example of how you can create common ground.

EXERCISE – COMMON GROUND

Lack of common experience between the communicator (instructor) and the receiver (student) is probably the greatest single barrier to effective communication.   From the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook.

In other words, it’s impossible to teach effectively unless the teacher and the student already know the material. In this exercise we will explore the creation of common experiences.

Break into teams. Choose the most complicated topic you know very well; it can be academic or a physical skill. Start with the end goal…what are you trying to teach? What behavior are you trying to change? Then back up and create a lesson plan that takes your students through a series of steps until you can find common ground. Teach the lesson.