Did Your Session Work?

Did It Work?

You prepared for and ran a great session. People were engaged in real conversations, you got a compliment about how you did, and you do a little dance on the way out.

Did it create change, though? 

This is the part of adult learning that most of us know but can’t put words to: engaged does not mean transferred. Understood doesn’t mean applied. People may even have been truly inspired, but they may not have been changed. 

Transfer is the word for what happens when learning actually moves from the session into practice. The research on transfer is pretty humbling, because it tells us that transfer isn't the natural outcome of good learning design. It's the outcome of a very specific set of conditions, most of which have nothing to do with what happened in the room.

The model that changed how I think about this

Baldwin and Ford published their transfer of learning model in 1988. It holds up because it names something most professional learning systems prefer not to look at directly. They identified three clusters of variables that determine whether learning transfers. 

The first is the learner: their prior knowledge, their motivation, their belief in their own ability to actually use what they've learned. 

The second is the training design: how closely the learning experience reflects the real conditions people work in, whether practice was built in, whether feedback arrived at the right moments. 

The third is the work environment: whether supervisors reinforce the learning or ignore it, whether peers are using the new practice or quietly letting it go, whether there's actually time and permission to do anything differently.

Here's what the model is really saying: all three clusters have to be present. A motivated learner in a well-designed session still won't transfer learning into a work environment that actively works against it. A supportive workplace can't compensate for learning that was never designed for application in the first place. The system either holds or it doesn't, and it usually doesn't because we only focus on one part of it. 

The part we keep skipping

Most professional learning investment goes into the session. We design it carefully, we think about engagement, we build in activities and reflection and discussion. And that matters. But if we stop there, we've essentially built something that works beautifully inside the room and has no real plan for making it to Tuesday.

The work environment cluster is the one that gets the least attention, and it's often the most decisive. Not because the other two don't matter, but because a hostile transfer climate can undo almost everything else. If someone leaves a session genuinely motivated to try something new and then walks into a building where there's no time, no support, and no visible interest from leadership in whether anything changed, the motivation tends not to outlast the month.

I’m not trying to be cynical. This is how it currently works. But understanding the model changes how I think about the session design. The question we should be asking isn't just "Was the session good?" It's “What do these people need in order to really use this?” 

What this means in practice

It means asking different questions before you build. Not just "what do I want people to know or be able to do?" but "what will they walk back into, and does this design account for that?" It means being honest when the transfer conditions are working against you, and designing differently because of it rather than hoping engagement will carry the day.

Sources used: Baldwin and Ford (1988).