Imagine you’ve been asked to create a course for front line factory managers on coaching their staff.
These, as you know, can be very emotional as supervisors are often too concerned to take a straight and honest line with some of their staff.
The last thing you might want is a coaching conversation that ends up as an argument.
In the assignment section of your modlette you have a question like this:
“In the coaching conversation, which of these techniques would you use to encourage a person to change their behaviour?”
- Open ended question
- Affirmation
- Reflective listening
- Summary
If you introduced this concept earlier, this question probably aligns to that content and to your learning objective. However, it’s very abstract.
Now let’s see how we could write this as a mini-scenario
Joan is a production manager who runs a packaging line.
She has a young man who is training to be a machine setter. She has had a number of complaints from other workers that he is a distraction as he wants to talk too much. His passion is cars, and he will stop work at any time to talk about cars.
Joan decides it is time to stop this behaviour so she asks him into her office with the intention of changing his behaviour through a coaching conversation.
What is the best question to ask according to our coaching conversation techique:
- Do you think you talk too much about non-work subjects during work hours?
- How do you think your conversational behaviour affects your work mates?
- Do you understand how your continuous chatter affects your work mates?
- Do you think you would be better to give your work more attention?
In this second scenario, a mini-scenario sets up the question. This provides context. Now it’s a concrete situation with a problem to solve, rather than an abstract comprehension question. This question is about applying the concept in a relevant situation rather than just remembering what you read. The open question is the best approach.
These mini-scenarios are fairly easy to create. It doesn’t take much more time to write using the modlettes multiple choice questions.
You will find more on writing testing scenarios on our website www.modlettes.com/resources and go to “The 4 C’s of Scenarios”, and “Why scenarios”.