Meaningful Impact

What it means

Impact means creating a positive or negative change in someone's life or the environment. The opposite is impotence, meaning there is activity but no resulting change from that activity. For example, if you want to start a fire to warm your food. There are internal factors (dryness of the firewood), external inputs (matches) and a supportive context (three stones to hold the pot). Without any one of these resources, and without you striking the match, you do not achieve the impact desired.

Meaningful impact is when people find the change important, useful, and relevant. So if you make a fire in a place that already has an electric stove, you have made a change, yes, but it is meaningless to that household. We want meaningful impact!

In a program, this looks like designing learning experiences which result in some meaningful change in participants lives or environment. For example, you might want to solve the problem of students having poor critical thinking skills by designing a complex puzzle for them to solve. If you want to make that impact meaningful, you might choose a puzzle related to their math lessons. Or even turn it into a math competition in the school!


Why it is important

There are many programs and learning experiences that do not lead to meaningful impact. You probably have examples of this from your own education! Have you ever finished a course and thought "That was a waste of my life"? We do not want to waste people's time. But most importantly, we want to respect the investments participants make, organizations make, trainers make, by designing meaningful and high impact learning experiences.

We all deserve a high quality education!

Listen to the smooth tunes of Meaningful Impact in Video #1:

Practical Design Applications of Meaningful Impact:

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. Program Activities
  3. Consistent Language (names, hype, packaging)
  4. Logic Models

Best Practice

  • Get data on your participants before
  • Visit and observe your designs in use regularly
  • Set high expectations
  • Ensure your language is inspiring to your target group
  • Package related concepts and tasks together in exciting and innovative ways

Good Variation

  • Get feedback on your designs afterwards
  • Talk to your participants regularly
  • Set realistic expectations
  • Ensure your language is easily understood by your target group
  • Make tasks sound enticing and easy to achieve
  • Ensure participants have the internal & context requirements

Do Not

  • Judge your designs from your own personal experience
  • Rely solely on second-hand feedback and opinions
  • Set goals you know participants can achieve with minimal effort
  • Repeat strategies you know have not been high impact in the past
  • Make plans that only link to impact through hope

Hope is a slogan not a strategy!

Key Skills

  1. Create meaningful activities and designs that target an impact people care about
  2. Select language, imagery, and frameworks which inspire participants to action
  3. Create objectives which anticipate and solve barriers to impact
  4. Innovate on typical learning experience designs to achieve higher impact

References & Resources:

Watkins_04_Leading_and_Lng.pdf

How much do you understand leading learning?

Read this to find out the three types of learning!

Japanese Lesson Study_learning_through_lesson_planning.pdf

Example:

Japanese anticipation in lesson design