Sticker notes!
I was always someone who liked a training course, getting away, spending some time focusing on something (hopefully) interesting for a couple of days and coming away with new skills. Something that always made me feel comfortable and safe at the start of a day was course notes!
Usually professionally produced and bound they gave me confidence that I wouldn’t miss anything. I’d be able to concentrate on the trainer, the material, the exercises without having to be distracted writing anything down!
I accumulated a lot of these course notes over the years. They moved desks, offices, companies and houses with me. I rarely remember looking at them since the courses they belong to…
A few years ago I attended a workshop called Training from the back of the room run by Adventures with Agile. It was a couple of days looking at different ways of creating an environment for people to learn as opposed to teaching (talking at!) them. Many useful exercises and ideas and a sprinkling of neuroscience theory around how people interpret and retain knowledge.
‘Writing trumps reading’ one of Sharon Bowman’s six trumps
Learners cognitively process information a second time when they write it after hearing it. Furthermore, most learners will remember content that they write longer than the content they hear, or the content they read.
This fundamentally changed the way that I design training and facilitate workshops and learn myself. It also lead to my interest in visual facilitation and learning of Bikablo.
Often now if I attend a training course, lecture, workshop I will sketch my own notes as we go along.
I find that taking my own notes I miss maybe 10% of what is going on in the room but that I get so much more out of the other 90%. The visual nature of the notes I take, the concentration and effort that goes into absorbing some information, interpreting it and then laying my version of it out onto a page is what works for me.
I wondered how could I bring a little bit of this magic to things that I teach… I can’t expect everyone to be able to sketch note (although I have actually considered teaching some skills at the start of some courses!). Is there a way I can give people the tools to create their own illustrated notes, a head start perhaps…
Also, everyone loves stickers! ❤️
Build your own Scrum
The original inspiration for sticker notes came from an exercise I got from the wonderful Dave Hicks while co-training with him. Dave would build the Scrum process diagram on a wall (with the help of the course delegates). The involvement of everyone in creating this diagram rather than just looking at it on a slide was wonderful. It was a very popular exercise and one I now really enjoy using a version of. It certainly fit with my understanding of neuroscience and learning and at the end most people were desperately keen to take a picture of the thing that they had helped to make.
I wondered if they might get even more if they had their own personalised version to take away.
I took the images and the arrows from the build your own Scrum game and produced some stickers to allow people to build along with me during the exercise.
People were now able to take a more personal copy of the diagram with them but it also allowed them to record their observations, thoughts, questions as we went along.
I had originally expected this to fit on an A4 bit of paper after the first time we ended up with some quite elaborate creations full of notes so on to A3 card it was next time.
The feedback was good. I won’t pretend everyone in the room when I do this exercise creates something like this. Some are happy to just, watch and take things in; that’s more than fine. I did however find a good proportion of a room of people would take part and I some people get really excited about the whole thing!
Practicalities
Creating the stickers themselves was easier than I had expected. Avery style laser labels from Amazon come in a dazzling array of sizes and are relatively cheap. They’re also suitable for writing on top of.
I found that I could get templates for the various sizes with boxes corresponding to each sticker from the actual Avery website.
Pictures and text can easily be put into individual stickers, copied around, etc etc. It really was pretty painless.
A couple of little tips:
The label templates have little grey borders round each sticker box. These print and if you’re just a tiny bit wrong with the margins they look awful. Change them to white/no colour!
I have a decent-ish laser printer at home but have managed to produce decent enough ones on an inkjet. Particularly on a laser you want to look for the media settings and make sure it knows its printing on labels — it does make a difference to the quality!
Build your own notes!
After the build your own Scrum sticker trial I decided to go a bit further and see if I could replace printed course notes altogether!
The plan was very much to give people diagrams, headings, useful nuggets of information and whatever else they might need to scaffold their own notes. This is all without going too far and simply giving people whole note pages in sticker form!
This has lead to quite an eclectic collection of stickers as I’ve built up a little library over the last year or so.
Some of the first stickers were lifted straight from slides I had used. Often these were diagrams or perhaps important headings/concepts. This was an easy way to get started.
Next was just the results of a google image search, possibly with some heading text. This created some wonderful stickers! Unicorns, mouldy bananas, zombie lego figures!
Finally I’ve been adding drawn stickers, very similar to the style that I use on my flip charts. These often represent little more than headings to help people connect what we’re talking about to the notes that they create. Scaffolding.
I will usually provide people with a few sheets of stickers in a plastic wallet and a decent quality notebook.
If I’m still using some slides it’s good to have common pictures shown, if I’m just using flipchart drawings (as I sometimes do now) I’ll try to draw some of the content in the stickers to help people follow along.
The general intention is for people to connect the stickers to something I’m saying, put them in the notebook and then write a few words around them to make them personal.
I try to encourage people to record their thoughts, observations. It isn’t just about putting the stickers in a notebook but instead using them as the structure, basis, starting point for their own notes. Something to help them layout their thoughts and their ideas in a way that helps to process that information and embed that knowledge.
I’ve had varying levels of success with sticker notes. To some extent it still depends on the culture of the organisation I’m working with. I’ve given people a choice in the past between stickers or printed notes and if nothing else it always starts an interesting conversation!
I would say that on average about a quarter of people adore sticker notes and become more engaged, about half build their notes happily as we go along and the other quarter don’t really take part. I don’t have any comparable numbers for people’s use of printed course notes, how people revisit them over time, etc but it feels like it’s worth pursuing further.
Some tips
One of the things I find people do struggle with is when to use the stickers.
With course notes and indeed slides there is a clear structure and order. This is one of the first things you give up when you have a more fluid workshop or course…
Some stickers can be really obvious such as a section heading or a diagram that you draw, others can just pass people by.
I don’t have an order as such that I expect people to create their sticker notes in but it doesn’t mean I can’t have an order that I would create them in. Sharing this can be of use to people.
A set of stickers for myself and a piece of flipchart paper on the wall allows me to use the stickers throughout a day. It gives people permission to use the stickers themselves at the risk of prescribing things a little too much.
Many printed notes have contact details for the trainer in them. I struggled with this for a little while even giving people business cards to take away (that they promptly lost).
The answer was stupidly simple as it turned out. Contact details sticker!
The same exact dilemma and then solution applied to reading lists / book recommendations. If there’s a bit of information people really need just make sticker with it.
One of my favourite additions to sticker notes is reflective template stickers. Something that has questions or structure and space for people to reflect on some question. Also something that they can take away and look at again in the future.
This again fits with neuroscience principles (and frankly coaching) getting people to consider their learning and/or situation and then create a reflection they can come back to later.
I think there’s a lot more to say about reflective templates with powerful coaching questions so look out for another article on that at some point!
Sticker notes are a work in progress for me but I find the whole process really exciting and I’ve seen in a room of people the engagement it can create. Hard work but worth it is my thinking.
What few stickers could you create for one of your workshops that might help people to create some valuable notes?
Would love to hear people’s ideas in the comments.
