REC - EMTC: Insight 2/2: People learn... in the process of playing

I N T E R V I E W

'People learn... in the process of playing'

Dana Nicolescu is an experienced Romanian trainer who currently works as the director of Opportunity Associates-Romania, an NGO that provides environmental training. She also serves as member of the board of the Regional Environmental Center (REC).

You have conducted a lot of courses in your home country, Romania, and in other countries as well. Have you ever used training games?

Yes, always. Every single session has its own game. We are calling them structured experience. Games provide participants with experiences. Because the trainer chooses the game on purpose and knows which experiences he expects and what is going to be happen, this experience is structured. Through the evaluation of the game the experience becomes structured for the participant as well.

What training games do you use? Please give an example.

There are so many. Well, for example, I ask participants to form two circles. Then I will give the inner circle an apple, a banana, a lemon or whatever and ask them to create a game with that object. The outer circle has to observe them.

And what is the aim of the game?

The point is to see how people communicate and how they are negotiating. And the others are observing - a highly needed management skill as well - what is happening in the group: who is going to be the first one, who wants to be the boss, who is shy, how people react to each other, who has leadership skills and so on. After the game, I give feedback to each person, telling them what I observed and what were their strengths and weaknesses. I am giving advice on how to do better.

What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of training games?

This is always highly dependent on the design, the training team and the trainer itself. But I will try to give you an answer.

First, you have to make sure that the game is appropriate to your aims and the trainees. If not there are only disadvantages.

The advantages are that people are really learning something if they are properly done. There is difference between process and contents. People are really having fun but they continue working very hard at the same time for long time.

As a trainer you have to be very careful monitoring a game. Participants normally will forget that it is not only for the sake of fun but that there is a purpose in this game. You have to watch that every participant comes back to a conscious level at the appropriate time so that he can learn out of his - and the others' - experiences. Now we are concentrating on this aspect of your behavior.

I personally think the best aspect of games is that people learn something in the process of playing. They are not just confronted with theoretical demands, but they learn how they behave and how they can do better.

We call that EA. E for experience and A for analysis. You analyze a moment of the game. The trainer is basically choosing the moment and then the whole group will analyze this particular moment under his guidance. The amazing thing is that people have such different views on a certain moment and it is so important to clarify.

These advantages cannot be harvested if you do not have a purpose, an objective with that game. I have seen this in other countries in Eastern Europe where trainers were giving games just for the sake of playing, of having fun. And it was fun, but at the end of the day participants ask themselves "why have we wasted two hours on that game? We have not learned anything; it was just fun." So you have to be very careful when you are using games.

Are you sometimes confronted with people who do not want to join the game?

Not really. This happens only sometimes in the first stage. But when you are conducting it well, when you give clear instructions about the game and its aim, people want to join. But if they do not want to play, they do not want to. You cannot force them. Actually, in a lot of games you do not have this problem - you just ask a part of the group to observe. But indeed, after the first round people realize that playing is more fun and easier than observing. So for the second game it is harder to find observers than players.

In the beginning, I thought as well that this is not going to work, but actually it works quite well and I am always amazed how much fun people have in the games. It functions with almost every group, and we trained people from all ages, all sectors and the most diverse backgrounds.

Actually you have more problems with people who think they are the brightest and do not want to work together with everybody else, but thatÕs just with certain people. Normally at the end of a day they discover that the others have something very valuable.

What is the most important aspect to look at when you use training games?

You have to give participants clear instructions about the game, and after they finish and you start to process, to remind them what you have in mind. It should be clear what is the purpose of the game. The other essential factor is to create a safe environment, making clear that nobody is making fun of anyone.

Are you using a commercial game, or have you developed one in your everyday practice?

We are using both. There are many good commercial ones available. But actually it is true that there often is a need to adapt games in foreign training manuals as well as adapting the manuals in general.

For example, I once had a manual with a game that played in the desert. Well, no one in Romania knows about the desert. It is so far away from people's culture that you cannot use this game to get good results. All participants thought it is stupid because it wasn't close to our culture.

Or a different example. One course had a game to teach fund-raising by post. This is stupid because we do not have a cheque system. In Romania, you have to try everything out because in our transition countries you never know if it works. That's why we employ mainly NGO professionals.

REC * EMTC * PUBLICATIONS * INSIGHT * AUTUMN 1997