Engaging Diverse Participants: A Framework
When it comes to designing and facilitating impactful learning experiences, one of the biggest challenges that informal educators face is not being able to get to know their participants as individuals. Best practice in formal education around meeting the needs of diverse learners is building relationships: getting to know the intellectual, emotional, and cultural world of each individual learner to know how best to support their engagement and learning. That kind of relationship building is possible when educators spend day after day with their learners; informal educators don’t get that luxury. At museums, zoos, nature centers and the like, visitors show up for programs that last for as little as an hour or two.
When the same rules for successful learning experiences apply regardless of the context, what can informal educators do to ensure their programs are as learner-centered as possible? Spoiler alert: A lot!
The cycle below is a framework that informal educators can use, on your own or with your team, to ensure that education programs are designed to meet the needs of diverse learners and create an engaging, impactful experience for all participants.
Jump into the cycle wherever it makes the most sense for you!1. Learn
What can you do to learn about your participants in advance?
If the program requires pre-registration (i.e., it’s not a drop-in situation), you can learn a lot about your participants before they arrive. A simple questionnaire as part of the registration can help you discover key information like:
Primary languages
Physical accessibility needs
Sensory or processing needs
Prior experience with the topic
DO tailor your questionnaires based on what the program involves, ensuring you’re only asking what’s really necessary
DO offer to collect this information over the phone (people may feel uncomfortable sharing some information via email)
DO provide a detailed description of what the program typically involves (e.g., loud noises, sitting or standing for extended periods, discussion, group projects) and ask if any modifications or accommodations are requested based on that info - this may catch needs that your questionnaire didn’t ask about
For school groups or multi-day programs, Zoom with the group in advance if you can! A quick 10-minute virtual meet-and-greet, and you are no longer strangers to each other; that personal recognition when you then see them in person can go miles in creating the psychological safety that humans need to be able to fully engage in a learning experience, and that educators need to be fully warm, welcoming, and present.
2. Plan
What needs can you anticipate, and how can you plan to meet them?
Once you’ve learned what you can about your participants in advance, it’s time to put that info to use in your planning. And even if you weren’t able to learn about your participants in advance, you can still draw on prior experiences to anticipate participants’ needs and plan to meet them.
Universal Design for Learning wisely advises that there is no such thing as the “average” learner, so best practice is to plan for the extremes. In doing so, you’ll be casting the widest net for engagement. What does this look like? Here are some examples:
Consider the learners on the far ends of a continuum between needing multiple supports to be successful, and being very confident and independent. Planning for the learners on the ends makes it more likely that you’ll also catch those who are somewhere in between.It’s probably not possible to design the perfect experience that is going to meet every participant where they’re at, and that’s OK! A good place to start is with whatever the key activities are, and/or the most important takeaways you’d like participants to have. Do what you can to make those moments as widely accessible as possible, based on what you already know about this group and how engagement has looked with past groups.
DO bring a learner mindset to this work! Every time you facilitate a program, you get a chance to learn more about what’s going on when you see great engagement from your participants, and what might be getting in the way when engagement flags. You get to be a student of your own experience.
3. Connect and Communicate
When participants are present, how can you convey your care for them and the experience they have with you?
If you’re only able to focus on one part of this framework for engagement, make it this one! Connect and Communicate is what you do in the moment, when this unique group of humans is in front of you, versus when they are abstract ideas in your mind. Clear communication and a genuine effort to connect with participants can go a looooong way in creating the psychological safety needed for them to engage, even if research and planning in advance isn’t possible.
☞ CONNECT
Informal educators generally do not get to spend weeks and months getting to know the learners in their spaces the way formal classroom teachers do. Does that mean connection isn’t possible? Absolutely not! Building relationships takes time, but it only takes a moment to make a connection:
Greet program participants one-by-one as they enter the space with eye contact and a smile.
Use name badges to and address people by their names instead of “You with the glasses”.
Start off with a quick and painless icebreaker: A chance for people to use their voice in your space, to get your undivided attention, and for you to learn something (low-stakes) about them as an individual, and vice versa.
Repeat people’s discussion contributions back to the group so they know they’ve been heard and to validate (without evaluating) their idea.
Turn up your compassion dial and remember your intention to meet the needs of your learners. If we can avoid taking a lack of engagement personally (very hard, I know!) it gets much easier to focus on what participants might need from us.
☞ COMMUNICATE
When I’m on a plane and the ride gets bumpy, I really appreciate it when the pilot gets on the PA and says something like, “we’re just encountering some turbulence - we should be through it in about 15 minutes.” I’m not the world’s most anxious flyer, but when there’s no communication and we’re just bumping around up there, I can get nervous… and I imagine that feeling is amplified for those who have real fears of flying. That little bit of communication from the people in charge about what’s going on, and what to expect, is so comforting. But I also imagine that many pilots, who experience run-of-the-mill turbulence day in and day out, may forget that it’s concerning to some passengers.
For learners coming into our spaces who are not our frequent flyers, communication from the person in charge about what’s going on and what to expect—even if it seems obvious to us—can make a big difference in their comfort level!
DO share the program agenda when participants first arrive. If you’re in a classroom or staying in one place for a while, keep the agenda visible (e.g. on a screen or easel). If you’ll be moving around, consider offering handouts with the agenda for anyone who wants one.
DO practice gentle transitions. Give participants a heads up when a transition is coming, and what will be happening (e.g., “In 5 minutes, we are going to wrap up this activity and then we will come together as a group to talk about what we did.”).
DO share brief explanations for why we’re doing something, in addition to what we’re doing. This can help participants understand the big picture and increase buy-in. A little bit of redundancy between this and your transition info is great, as it reinforces the message!
DO communicate expectations for behavior, as well as what participants can expect from the space. Will it be loud or quiet? What will we see? What kind of behavior is/is not the norm? What should we do if we need a break? Where are the restrooms?
DO be mindful of information overload:
Practice saying these things without unnecessary words
Explain once, and then ask if anyone needs more info
Communication is critical for putting participants at ease, but if we say too much they may tune out, miss the important stuff, or feel anxious because there is too much to process.
4. Get Feedback
After the program is over, how can we find out from the participants themselves whether they felt engaged?
The best way to know how well we are meeting our learners’ needs is to ask them! Brief surveys can provide a lot of actionable info, both about how participants experienced the program and what they took away from it (i.e., if learning goals were met). In certain situations, a pre- and post-program survey might make sense; for example, if you want to measure changes in thinking.
When designing surveys, KISS: Keep it Short and Sweet. I’m updating the KISS acronym because I don’t support calling people silly, but also because short AND sweet are important:
Short - not too many questions, and only one or two short-answer (the rest can be ratings, agree/disagree scales, checkboxes, etc.)
Sweet - Get at the heart of what you want to know (i.e., focus on the cognitive and social-emotional goals of the program), and think about what you’ll do with the information you collect. If the feedback won’t be actionable, you’re outside the sweet spot.
But wait! Surveys are not the only way to get audience feedback! Other possibilities include:
Temperature checks during the program. Ask participants to show you a number of fingers (“fist to five”) based on how well they are grasping the content, if they’re clear on instructions, if they see the connection between the previous activity and this one, etc.
A reflection discussion at the end of the program. You may lose some candidness with people sharing their opinions non-anonymously, but you’ll gain the opportunity to ask follow up questions.
For camps, check in with caregivers at drop-off or pick-up. “Hey [mom/grandpa/auntie], I know you mentioned Buddy can experience anxiety, so I just wanted to get your opinion - do you think he’s feeling comfortable here?”
5. Reflect!
How will you process what you’ve learned from this cycle to move your program—and how participants experience it—closer to your goals?
OK, so all that work you did learning about your participants in advance, planning in anticipation of their needs, connecting and communicating in the moment, and getting their feedback about what they experienced? Deliberate reflection is the step in the cycle where this work pays off … or put another way, it’s the difference between the Engagement Framework cycle serving as a forward-moving vehicle, or a hamster wheel.
I will be the first to admit that making time for deliberate reflection is not easy. I listen to audiobooks while I walk my dog, and the books I choose are the ones I want to learn from, because I struggle to focus when I try to read nonfiction with my eyes. And during every walk, I tell myself that as soon as I get home, I will spend 10 minutes jotting down notes on what I took away from that chapter, so that I can process and hopefully remember what I learned. Yet when I walk through the front door it’s like I’m coming out of the elevator onto the Severed Floor. My Innie has no idea about my Outtie’s plan for a 10 minute reflection - she just immediately jumps back into refining macrodata and wondering WTF is going on with the goats.
But there are strategies that can help make deliberate reflection happen, and I’m here to try them with you!
Write a few journal prompts for yourself ahead of time, based on your goals for learning and engagement. Leave your notebook open to that page someplace where you’ll see it after the program is over. (I’m gong to try this for my audiobook reflections!)
Write an email to yourself with your reflection prompts, and schedule it to send at the time when you know you’ll have a few minutes to pay attention to it.
Ask your manager or a colleague to schedule a weekly reflection chat with you.
Share your learning and engagement goals with your manager or colleague, and ask them to observe your program and share their reflections.
Record all or part of the program and watch it (alone) later - this is great for providing a more objective sense of what happened than your memory can offer.
Start your own Critical Friends Group with other educators.
Whatever way you choose to reflect:
DO look for concrete examples—evidence—for your reflection. What did you see or hear that makes you think x or y happened?
DO challenge your assumptions - what else might have been going on?
DO make this about the participants’ experience, not about you as an educator. A great educator is not the person who does everything perfectly. A great educator is the person who genuinely cares about meeting learners’ cognitive and social-emotional needs, and makes evidence-based efforts to continually grow and refine their practice.
You’re not in this alone! Contact Learning Unbound for support with:
Designing questionnaires and surveys to get the most useful information from your participants
Strategies to meet learners’ needs on both ends of the continuum
Techniques for effective communication and connection
Program observation and feedback
Facilitating critical reflection
Systems to embed these practices in your team’s culture