Recapping TLDC: Learning Culture in L&D (Sara Stevick)

This is a series of posts recapping and reacting to sessions from the recent January 2023 Training, Learning, and Development Community (TLDC) event to support teachers transitioning to L&D. The full event recordings can be found at the TLDC website.

Summary: Sara Stevick opened the conference with a talk on how learning culture varies from corporate L&D to education. A few key points of wisdom Sara shared include the collaborative nature of work outside the classroom, the need to understand your organization’s current culture, and how to understand the metrics and goals at a new organization. Another key reminder is that a key difference between education and instructional design is that education is NOT the goal of most businesses, like it is most schools, and that many professionals you work with in an L&D function will have a business background, NOT an education background. She discusses lots of ways to build rapport within your organization, investigate the current learning culture and climate, and be effective in a new instructional design role…and how that differs greatly from being effective as an educator.

I love this quote and how it shows a relationship-building skill as business acumen. Business acumen sounds intimidating to teachers, but it’s really about collaboration at the heart of it. That does involve learning, speaking the language of business, and skills such as tying actions to metrics. But at the heart of it, instructional design is a people business.

We have to learn about people, care about people, form relationships with people, and use business acumen to achieve the results we want. We need to know our stakeholders too, not just our learners. Sara talks a lot about assessing the existing culture of the organization and respecting what already exists when you first join an organization before leaping to change, even positive change. This is very important, and showing this business mindset will be crucial for teachers to show they’re ready for the change to a corporate field.

So, for each of these, I’m also going to suggest things you can DO next, and I’m going to call it “Teacher Transition Homework” essentially. These are all going to be activities you can do in a notebook (or wherever you want, but you may need to get creative in an online document).

So, what should you do to build on this understanding?

(I highly suggest drawing the Venn diagram yourself or crafting it yourself in some form to best fit you, but you can download my version as a PDF here if it’s beneficial in any way. It is not a fillable one: Venn Diagram PDF.)

Let’s engage in some gap analysis based on your particular experiences. I suggest a good old-fashioned Venn diagram. Think about the learning culture at your school for teachers, as staff and compare it to someone else’s experience. By L&D experience, I mean the one created by L&D (on purpose or accidentally, or as a result of not having an L&D team) in a culture or other different setting, something outside education.

One thing I find interesting: schools are supposed to have robust learning cultures for staff too, but they often never get to this goal. That’s not really so different than challenges faced outside of education in some ways. But you have to “zoom out” of your classroom, and you also have to understand — as Sara said — the different goals and stakeholders involved. I feel like a comparison activity is a good mental shift here.

See more in this Loom about what I mean:

About this Activity (Watch on Loom) (Loom Transcript)

The point of this homework — and any of the homework I give — is to start getting you thinking critically about teaching vs. learning and development, how they intersect and where they differ, and to develop some understanding of business acumen. So this was a perfect place to start, with the very first session, because Sara refers back to business acumen over and over, and also to ROI (Return on Investment) and profits, at the heart of business. (Think of profits as test scores, only better because they mostly accurately measure themselves, and test scores are meant to represent learning…which is sometimes a flawed metaphor.) None of the homework I give you — even on the resume or interview workshop — will be about creating your materials and applying to jobs.

This is the step before that, the step where you think and build or refine that business acumen, close some gaps, reframe your mindset, hopefully. I find people often leap to the step where they’re creating a portfolio or rewriting a resume before they shift that mindset.

About the Speaker: Check out Sara Stevick on LinkedIn or at the Teaching: a Pathway to L&D website.