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Training should not be reduced to passive listening!
Simple e-learning or lectures, while useful for transferring knowledge, do not enable effective, long-term retention of information. Other methods, such as role-playing and exercises based on concrete, realistic cases, encourage learning.
Today's professionals are turning to training courses that focus on the practical application of information acquired in their day-to-day work, enabling them to move from knowledge to competence.
The rule is simple: take action!
We memorize more easily what we have experienced ourselves: by being confronted with a situation, we can apprehend our own reactions and evaluate possible obstacles. This is called experiential learning.
This action-based pedagogical approach involves learners carrying out and living the experience in order to deduce and memorize a lesson. Theorized in 1984 by David Kolb, experiential learning considers that meaningful learning necessarily involves action.
To put it very simply: knowing the breaststroke theoretically won't enable you to swim, you'll have to train in the water. It's more or less the same principle applied to all fields of training.
In this way, learning is achieved through theory, but above all through practical application, i.e. experimentation. This is active teaching.
As Martine Mauriras Bousquet points out in Théorie et pratique ludiquethere is "no clear dividing line between a case study, a simulation game and a role-playing game". That's why we won't define role-playing separately, as otherwise we'd have to go into a lot of detail.
Role-playing allows you to recreate real or imaginary scenes. Applied to training, its aim is to give participants the opportunity to apprehend situations close to those they encounter, or could encounter, in their daily professional lives.
Whether you're dealing with common situations that are at the heart of your business (customer reception, advice, presentation of services, etc.), or more complex situations (an angry customer), the advantage of role-playing is that you work on a concrete, clearly defined case. Learners play roles of varying degrees of definition, enabling them to analyze their behavior and reactions to a problem and identify best practices. Let's imagine a sales situation: the trainee can just as easily take on the role of salesperson as that of customer, in both cases learning from the situation.
For the strategy to be effective, of course, we need to ensure that learners are exposed to a quality experience, offering a suitable learning challenge. So goodbye to the idea of improvised role-playing! You need to prepare the situation so that it is meaningful, take into account the level of the trainees right from the design stage, and adapt the level of guidance during the game according to the phase the learner is in.
Finally, there's no room for improvisation when it comes to post-game analysis: debriefing and feedback are essential if the experience is to have an impact.
With role-playing, the learner is obliged to get involved, and is no longer passive. They participate and make their own choices.
Intervening regularly keeps learners focused and alert. Being active makes it easier to learn and memorize content. We can recall here the contributions of psychoeducator Roger Mucchielli, who demonstrated that we retain only 10% of what we read and 20% of what we hear, but that we remember over 90% of what we do ourselves.
As its name suggests, role-playing is first and foremost a game. Learning through play will arouse the trainee's curiosity, interest and pleasure. From that moment on, it will be much easier for the trainer to capture their attention and motivate them.
We can relate motivation to the various game mechanisms, which have a greater or lesser effect depending on the profiles and personalities of the learners. In his book Les jeux et les hommes, sociologist Roger Caillois defined these mechanisms as follows:
Role-playing can borrow from any of these mechanisms, making it a motivating tool for learners.
The game also helps to play down a situation of failure. In the training context, there are no real-life consequences. This is what we at PITCHBOY like to call the right to try.
According to American psychologist Jérôme Bruner, "play provides the opportunity to try out combinations of behavior that, under functional pressures, would not be attempted".
The inaction generated by the fear of making a mistake has no place here, and that's the whole point. In the end, making mistakes can encourage the learner to think about and find solutions to the problems presented to him/her, which can lead to greater responsibility and autonomy.
Role-playing cannot constitute a complete training course, but it is an ideal stage (or several stages) for assessing knowledge levels before and after training modules, and an opportunity to move from knowledge to skill without putting pressure on learners.
However, these scenarios do have their drawbacks. First, there's the problem of scale. Role-playing requires a limited number of participants, forcing us to repeat these sessions, which can become very costly for a company wishing to involve all its employees. Fortunately, technologies such as PITCHBOY make it possible to digitize certain role-play scenarios, enabling large-scale deployment and the involvement of a large number of employees, who can themselves replay the situation several times.
We can also point out that if the session is not recorded, it will be difficult for the trainer to remember everything that was said, so the debrief will sometimes have some gaps. PITCHBOY always offers a replay of conversational experiences and can give feedback to the learner, depending on the analysis grid established with the trainer.
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