5 Design Principles of the R1 Learning System – How Does Your Program Stack Up?
System – A set of principles and elements that are organized for a purpose.
Today’s post is dedicated to the R1 Learning System. Our goal is twofold… 1) that you better understand what we are building and how we are building it and 2) that you use these ideas as a lens to look through to evaluate your program.
Although people’s first exposure to the R1 Learning System were our Discovery Cards decks, it was clear from the beginning that we are much more than a card company. We gained support and respect from many of the thought leaders in the field at our first introductions. Several provided input on their topics and many shared their perspective that they think our greatest impact will be client engagement and workforce development – increasing the knowledge, skills, and effectiveness of the practitioners and educators at every level. They also think our tools provide an innovative approach to the fidelity problem – enabling programs to adopt and adapt the best practices into a wide range of populations and settings, with all levels of practitioners. We also have the industry’s technology leaders keeping track of our card development for they see the richness, modularity, structure, and approachability of our content that will soon be the foundation for highly interactive and engaging technology tools.
Our trainings have proven to be rich experiential learning environments for professional development. The idea of teaching practitioners with the same tools they will use with clients was our goal from the start. Tools engage, educate, and empower everyone to build a shared vocabulary, express themselves more effectively in both group and 1-on-1 settings, and provide a consistent and replicable approach for implementation. The ultimate goal for us is for practitioners to confidently walk into a group room and run an engaging impactful group immediately following our training, and leave with everything they need to effectively document individual treatment and recovery plans.
At the core of R1 Learning is the curation of evidence-based and best practice models and theories. Our mission is to build a comprehensive, modular, structured, and scalable set of solutions to reach and impact the field. Each day brings more use cases, more testimonials from users and programs, more requests for training, and with that, more excitement for what we are building and what we will be able to achieve.
R1 Solutions
Although the system solutions – our training, tools, technology, resources, and certification – are important from a business perspective, it is our system design principles that are our foundation for implementation that we are most excited about. Here is a brief overview on the 5 Design Principles of the R1 Learning System:
Evidence-based and best practices – The best practical application of the findings of the best available current research. R1’s purpose is to curate all of the evidence-based and best practice topics from the research base (studies, articles, and textbooks), break them down into their simplest form, and build educational tools in multiple modalities. The question driving us has been, “how can we take these best practices and put them into the hands of practitioners, educators, and clients and into the center of their discussions so that they can be adopted/adapted more quickly and easily?” It is difficult for practitioners to implement - add, use, integrate - these concepts when they are built into larger structures. In addition, some in the field may not understand the basics of what ‘evidence-based’ means and that the curricula currently being used sits on a continuum. Geoff Wilson help us to shine a light on the concept of evidence-based – what it is, what it isn’t, current strategies, their merits, barriers to implementation, etc. We want you to have a simple, more concrete, and educated lens to look through. Check out our Evidence Base website section and our blog series.
Comprehensive – The R1 Learning System is designed to include the most relevant and needed fundamental topics in mental health, co-occurring disorders, substance use disorder, and even life skill areas. We have also packaged them into a set of modular training and tools. What topics have you chosen to construct your program and curriculum? Why? Our goal is to bring these fundamental topics together into one learning system and make them readily available for practitioners, educators, and individuals in treatment and recovery. We are all about the fundamentals and enabling them to be put into practice more quickly and easily. Check out our topics and see what is available today and what is coming. If you have any topics you would like us to add, please send us an email: r1team@r1learning.com. Also review our comprehensive set of training, tools, technology (coming soon), and resources too. Comprehensive for us includes both a broad set of content and a variety of solution modalities.
Modular – We are developing modular content, building a variety of educational tools, and making them more accessible. Each module is able to stand on its own, while also being part of a greater whole. Content that can be integrated into existing programs is part of our design. One of our goals is to breathe life into lecture, workbook, or worksheet driven programs and increase engagement through tools that place vocabulary building and self-discovery at the center of learning. Providing this content in different formats (visual models, infographics, posters, card decks, guides, group kits, practitioner kits, apps, handouts, checklists, quizzes, etc.) gives practitioners a variety of tools to use and adapt into a variety of settings and different populations. Tools enable practitioners to use these ideas in real time. Our training is modular too. This approach allows us to build customized learning series and Learning Labs easily based on program needs. Being able to plug and play the R1 Learning System training and tools into programs immediately increases engagement and learning.
Structured – This is key. We are building an organized, standardized, system of elements and modules to help everyone learn, use, and teach more quickly and easily. It is that simple. We know from learning theory that individuals absorb and process information differently based on many factors. The R1 Learning System has been designed to reach all learning styles. We have built color-coded visual models, broken down the theories into their key elements, defined them all, produced lists of items or behaviors that provide connection points for individuals to relate to more quickly. Because of the standardized structure, individuals can more easily understand these concepts and relate them to their own situations, retain this new knowledge, and most importantly to recall and apply it to future situations as needed. Our Discovery Cards decks, facilitator guides, and tools are built using a common structure. Our goal is that once you learn one of the R1 topics, all other topics can be learned or taught more easily because of the standard way they have been built.
Scalable – The ability to be scaled or expanded as needed is an outcome of what we have covered thus far. This is a barrier for so many programs. The R1 Learning System gives programs and practitioners a way to replicate and implement our tools with different populations, in a variety of settings, and with practitioners at all levels of knowledge, skill, and experience. Given the turnkey nature of our resources, implementation, a once challenging or overwhelming prospect, becomes achievable. Scalability can be at multiple levels; adding additional topics over time, broadening to different populations, educating additional levels of staff, or expanding to a variety of locations.
In summary, these 5 Design Principles enable programs and practitioners to implement – adopt and adapt – R1 Learning’s evidence-based and best practice content more quickly and easily. At the end of the day we want to make an impact. The R1 Learning System’s training, tools, and resources enable practitioners to place these concepts directly into the hands of clients, into the center of the discussions, expand vocabularies, provide structure for it, and empower clients to self-discover actionable goals for their individualized treatment or recovery plans. In these cases, the tools add value to the situation versus getting in the way, or not getting used at all. The result, more adoption, adaption, and success for practitioners, individuals in recovery, and their families.
A lot to think about. As we mentioned at the beginning, these design principles can be a lens for evaluating your program and curriculum. Use the following questions for yourself or with your team. We encourage you to add this to the agenda of your next team meeting. Hopefully, a rich discussion will result.
Questions To Explore – How Does Your Program Stack Up?
Evidence-based and Best Practices:
What topics have you included in your curriculum?
Are they evidence-based?
What level of the evidence-based hierarchy do they meet?
Comprehensive:
Do you have a variety of topics to use with your different populations? Why did you select them? Are they from different sources or the same provider?
Are you able to implement topics in different ways – through training, tools, resources, technology or other formats? Or, do you just have one way to deliver this information?
Do your practitioners and staff know these topics from their professional training or do you teach them the fundamentals of these topics when they join your organization?
Modular:
How easy or difficult is it for you to implement your curriculum? It it easily adopted by new hires?
Can you easily pull out a topic module and use it as a stand-alone activity or does it have to be part of the larger curriculum materials? How do your practitioners adapt the materials for their own use?
Do you have different modalities for the same topics that enable you to reach different learning styles or is it a “one size fits all” approach?
Structured:
Are all of the topics in your curriculum in a similar format or are they all organized differently?
Is it easy or difficult for your practitioners to learn your curriculum when they onboard your program? Why?
Is it easy or difficult for your clients to learn new topics as you introduce them? Why?
Scalable:
Do all of your program locations use the same curriculum or does each group do it differently? Why?
Are you able to use some of the same topics in your curriculum with different populations and in different settings? Or does everyone have to use the same workbook or approach with everyone?
Is it easy or difficult to implement your curriculum across different locations? Why?
Copyright 2020 Tom Karl / All Rights Reserved. Use of this article for any purpose is prohibited without permission.
We’ll go into more details on the solutions of the R1 Learning System in a future post. In the meantime, please help us with any of the following actions. Otherwise, stay tuned!
1. Share this blog post with others. (Thank you!)
2. Start a conversation with your team. Bring this information to your next team meeting or share it with your supervisor. Change starts in conversations. Good luck! Let us know how it goes.
3. Visit www.R1LEARNING.com to learn more about R1, the R1 Learning System, our Discovery Cards, and how we’re creating engaging learning experiences through self-discovery.