Learning in crisis: Five lessons from running the AMP Health Masterclass Series
“But will anyone in the ministries of health actually have time for this while trying to deal with the crisis?” This was the question at the top of our minds as AMP Health quickly switched from planning in-person trainings to developing an online masterclass series on leading and managing skills in a crisis. AMP Health Chief Learning Officer, Klara Michal, reflects on the five key lessons we have learned from running this series of interactive, online sessions.
Like so many organisations around the world, we have had to adapt to working within the constraints of a global pandemic. We believe that our work with ministries of health is more important now that ever. The teams we work with are facing unprecedented challenges and need our support.
Bringing teams together for experiential learning to strengthen leadership & management has always been a crucial part of our approach. Given the constraints that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on us and our partner teams, we have had to find new ways of working.
We recently ran our first online masterclass series on leading and managing in a crisis with seven ministry of health teams drawn from four countries. The feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive, and we wanted to share some of the key lessons that we learned from running this masterclass series.
1. Make the tech work for you
By now we are all familiar with the format: An expert shares slides (after the obligatory “can everybody see my screen?”) and talks for 20 minutes. This is followed by a Q&A dominated by one or two people who were only half listening.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
We have learned that when delivering online learning, your biggest enemy is distraction. This is why we make use of a whole range of tools – polls, interactive white boards, breakout groups, handouts – to ensure our ‘experiential learning’ approach remains strong despite going online. We wanted to ensure that participants would stay actively engaged for the majority of each session, and found that technology can actually help us do that.
2. If people see value in what you are doing, they will make time for it
By attending our weekly 90-minute sessions, the teams in the ministries of health were ‘voting with their feet’. This really hit home for us during a session on ‘Staying Productive (and Sane) in a Crisis’ when the head of a programme in one of our partner countries asked for advice on how best to prioritise his growing to-do list.
He explained that he was feeling overwhelmed by work, and expected to work a full day the following day, even though it was a national holiday. Despite knowing that he would have to work on a holiday, this busy leader chose to give up 90 minutes of his precious time to learn how to be more productive.
He also did this knowing that there are other online sessions to choose from, other priorities vying for his time, and other resources he could tap into (including simply Googling the topic). Why? Because he felt we focused on the right issues, practical advice, interesting exercises and relatable examples.
3. Ministry teams are hungry for leadership and management support
The world has mobilised to support the response to COVID-19, but much of this has focussed on buying and distributing diagnostic tests, medicines, and equipment or providing technical support for clinical management. These are crucial elements of the response, but without investing in the people charged with responding to COVID-19 and maintaining essential services, these health systems will remain vulnerable. After all, we rely on leaders and managers to identify what support their health workers need, and to ensure that the right kind of support is delivered.
When we asked our teams what they needed help with, they told us it was less about money and supplies but more about how to manage stakeholders, keep on top of their to-do list, mobilise their team effectively, and not burn out in the process. For the first time we’ve had team leaders asking us for coaching, something they have not prioritised in the past – we think this is a great sign of both self-awareness and a desire to improve.
4. Provide opportunities for peer learning
If you want to draw in a crowd, get a celebrity speaker to deliver a lecture. If you want people to actually learn, you must create the opportunity for peer learning.
Online tools allow us to collapse the physical distances between the country teams that we work with, and some of the most valuable learning opportunities that we have been a part of have come from creating the space for leaders from different countries to learn from one another.
We regularly make use of breakout discussions, where we give participants from different country teams the opportunity to privately discuss issues and to collaborate as they work through the exercises. These have consistently been highly rated by session participants. This isn’t surprising – the research on adult learning shows that people often learn more from peers than they do from experts. What is surprising is that more learning organisations and educators don’t pay attention to this.
5. Ask for feedback
It can be difficult to get a sense of the “room” when delivering content online. Did the participants enjoy it? Find it interesting? What do they want more of? What are they struggling with? How can we get better?
To address some of these questions we asked all of our participants to complete surveys after each masterclass. We also had one-on-one conversations with several participants to get more detailed insights. This has given us a wealth of information to draw from as we think about designing our next masterclass series. This pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon, and we still have a lot of learning ahead of us.
Klara Michal is AMP Health’s Chief Learning Officer. If you are interested in learning more about how AMP Health has been supporting ministries of health across Africa or would like to run a masterclass session with your team, please contact her at klara.michal@amphealth.org.