Don Binsted

The Design of Learning Events for Management Part 1

car, our house, the organisation structure we work in, or the bureaucratic procedure we battle with, have usually all been designed by someone else. Alternatively we may design for ourselves, typically for example, a garden, or a research project. In either situation we make judgements about the excellence of the design from our point of view as users, and the effect on us. The design of learning events for management is an activity which all management trainers, teachers, or developers become involved in, and the purpose of this article is:

The Tutor/Learner Interaction and its Effect on Management Learning

a tutor*) then the interaction between them becomes a critical part of the facilitating process. The purpose of this article is not to give simple definitive answers to the question of how the tutor/learner

Book Reviews : Managerial Consulting Skills. a Practical Guide Charles J. Margerison: Gower 1988. Hardback. 224 pp. ISBN 0 566 02793 3 £18.50

interaction effects management learning, but to report on the progress we are making in trying to find the answers. In this article we will share some ideas we have developed and also some tentative conclusions which we have reached. The aim of our research is to be able to analyse different patterns of interaction and relate these to specific learning outcomes. This enables us to identify and more fully understand the various elements of the tutor’s interactive skills. To define skills in terms of outcome is not very illuminating. To say that one person has a bicycle-riding skill and another has not, does little to illuminate what the skill of bicycle-riding is. A more detailed analysis is required to identify what elements constitute the skill. Our research is thus beginning to build up an ‘anatomy’ of the tutor’s interactive skills. Our method of doing this should be usable by the tutor to examine and understand his/her own behaviour and enhance his/her skills by a self development process.

The Tutor‐Learner Interaction in Management Development: Part V: Facilitating Learning from the De‐Briefing of Exercises

This book is about selling your services and acquiring clients. It is mechanical in its setting out of the basic steps in the process of buildng up your business even to the point of ncludng, and critiquing, letters of introduction to potential clients. There is good practical sense in the book for instance about deciding what you are in business for and in defining your’niche’ in the market and it is worth scanning because of this. However, I found the general approach rather simplistic and too solutions-onented, almost denying the importance of the dynamics between the consultant and the client in the process of securing a contract

Design for Learning in Management Training and Development: A View

In previous parts of this series, we have examined the behaviour used by tutors to facilitate learning when involved in giving inputs or leading discussions. In this paper, we concentrate on those sessions where the tutors interventions followed some form of task activity by the learners, e.g. exercises, case studies, structured experiences, role plays, games or simulations. This differentiates between “de‐brief” (which follows learner task activity) and discussion, which does not. As in the other papers in the series, this paper is based on research findings.