Cafeteria Learning is a learning methodology that supports learner choice. Learners spend all day, every day making decisions in their real world, doing their real jobs, and then when they come into a traditional classroom learning environment, they're told exactly what to do and how to behave and what activities to participate in. To us, that just doesn't make sense...
Do they all learn the same thing in a traditional instructor-led workshop? Cafeteria Learning is no different in that everybody comes to the session with their own needs, their own context, and their own work experience. What they're going to learn is always filtered through that personal experience. Even though they might choose different activities, each activity in a track is going to lead back to the same learning objective...
Cafeteria Learning works well with any topic that's nonlinear. Because the idea is that participants are choosing from a variety of activities, they can move at their own speed and direction, and they can do things in any order. There are typically nine activities (sometimes 12) that are available simultaneously, so it has to be a topic that doesn't require a linear learning experience...
Does it take longer than a regular, traditional workshop? Well, anything you do for the first time takes longer. It took us longer when we first created the concept...
We always make sure that we include activities that have a variety of different learning styles represented. We know that nobody is just a visual learner, just an auditory learner. Everybody learns in all these ways - we want to give learners the choice in the moment depending on how they're feeling that day and what is appealing...
Facilitating a Cafeteria Learning session is a lot of fun and it's really easy. The whole idea is that learners are almost facilitating themselves...
Chaos...well, Cafeteria Learning is kind of controlled chaos. There's a lot going on. You need a decent sized room (nothing too big so that it feels cavernous and empty, but big enough where people aren't bumping into each other) so each activity can have it's own table or it's own little station...
When we design the activities (nine to 12 for each session), we make sure that each activity takes roughly the same amount of time to complete...
Well, it doesn't. There's two things most critical for Cafeteria Learning. 1. Choice. Learners must be able to choose from a variety of activities. You can do that online with breakout rooms (like with Adobe Connect). 2. Face-to-face Interaction. We designed Cafeteria Learning so that learners have physical, tangible interactions - they're touching, feeling objects, having conversations, and looking each other in the eye...