Robert Gagne was an educational psychologist who created a nine step process called the Events of Instruction. Centered around how people process information, education practitioners in follow his systematic, structured approach to teaching.

The nine events provide a framework for an effective learning process, each step addressing a form of communication that supports the learning process. The steps essentially give designers an outline or prototype to use prior to performing teaching or training activities.

Per the model, when each step is completed, learners are much more likely to be engaged and to retain the information or skills that they are taught.

Here, we look at the these 9 events and show how the approach can help managers, trainers, facilitators, and instructional designers make better educational material.

Event #1: Gaining Attention

Use a strong and noticeable auditory, visual or verbal cue to signal the start of the training session, grab your learners’ attention and shift focus from what’s going on around them. This can be achieved by revealing a fun fact, asking a quirky or unexpected question, a visual prompt, such as images on slides.

Event #2: Informing Learners of the Objective

Place a value on your training by making it clear what your learners will achieve. This not only helps them achieve expectations related to the learning goal, but also motivates them complete each task. Some ways to outline learning objectives are co-creating success criteria as a class, or describing specific benchmarks to be met and how they would be measured.

Event #3: Stimulating Recall of Prior Learning

Prior experiences facilitate the learning process because they allow information to be stored meaningfully. Draw in skills or knowledge acquired by attendees prior to the session and link these with relevant aspects of the course. Prompting for prior knowledge can be achieved by referring back to topics covered earlier in the session, or asking students to share any related experiences they have had.

Event #4: Presenting the Content

Each learning outcome suits different delivery methods. Information should be presented in various ways in order to meet everyone’s learning style. There are many ways to meaningfully share content with learners such as matching learning outcomes with the right format, delivering the same message or task in a variety of formats, or allowing students to access information anytime through a digital platform.

Event #5: Providing Learning Guidance

With guidance, the rate of learning increases as students are less likely to become frustrated by poorly understood concepts. Some ways to provide learning guidance to students might be citing real-life examples of how your learning has been previously applied, or brainstorming ideas and co-creating a concept map to help students connect to the material.

Event #6: Eliciting Performance

At this point, it’s time for your team to take the stage and put what they’ve learned into practice. Encourage students to apply what they are learning in group and activities, written assignments, lab practicals, and so on. Demonstrating their newly acquired knowledge through performance helps cement knowledge. Some ways could be using interactive assessments, quizzes, and tests that focus on comprehension and application of learning.

Event #7: Providing Feedback

Feedback is a valuable tool used to keep students on track towards the learning goal. Personal and timely guidance from the instructor allows students to modify their performance in order to meet the objective. Make feedback personal and, most importantly, make it ongoing and timely. Do this by providing detailed and specific evaluations of skills or knowledge acquired, or asking students to critique their own work or performance.

Event #8: Assessing Performance

Here, you test whether the expected learning outcomes have been achieved on previously stated course objectives. Keep in mind that one performance cannot provide enough data to measure overall knowledge and abilities, so it is best to do multiple evaluations. To assess learning, you could administer pre- and post-tests to check for progression of competence, or embed formative assessment throughout instruction using oral questioning, short active learning activities, or quizzes.

Event #9: Enhancing Retention and Transfer

At the end of your instruction, learners need to be able to apply their knowledge to real-world situations. Help learners retain more information by providing them opportunities to connect course concepts to potential real-world applications. Ways to do this include having students reflect on how they will use what they learned in the future, or linking different lessons and demonstrate how these can be transferred to different situations.

As instructors, we want our students to be able to understand the content taught. We aim to ensure that students recall important information and demonstrate a strong performance. It is with a highly structured lesson plan that we can help students achieve the learning goals.

Structured, systematic, and step-by-step, Gagne’s nine events of instruction give instructional designers or course creators a clear, coherent yet adaptable approach to follow.