Think about the last training you attended. What was it about? Is your answer something like conflict management, data protection, communication or it is a principle? Or is it a principle or a concrete insight that has helped you do something differently now?
The Persistence of Content-first Design
The most common way training still gets built looks something like this: a sponsor defines a topic and a deadline, a subject matter expert provides the content, and an L&D professional turns it into something deliverable. Then participants sit in an instructor-led training going through theories, models and frameworks, asking why any of this matters to them and what they’re supposed to do with it. Anyway, even when the coffee is bad (it usually is), it’s always nice to talk to colleagues. People go back to work, having sat through a training on change and resilience, and call it a day.
But why is corporate training still designed content-based first? From a practitioner perspective, there are structural and political reasons: tight timelines, compliance culture, stakeholders who equate training volume with value… And there’s also the professional identity of the trainer. In many corporate learning contexts, the people shaping content are senior managers, colleagues or freelance trainers with deep subject matter expertise. They want to share everything they know and think it’s important, which produces content-first training almost automatically. Designing for transfer requires a different starting point.
Big Ideas and Essential Questions
Start from what you want people to understand, then work backward to instruction rather than starting from content and hoping understanding follows. If you’re familiar with frameworks like Action Mapping (C. Moore), you’ll recognize the backward design approach. Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, UbD, revised 2005) is a useful framework from K12 we can borrow to design learning experiences focused on meaning and transfer.
UbD names two recurring failures that content-first design produces: coverage (teaching as much content as possible without prioritizing what matters) and activity-orientation (engaging activities that don’t lead to insight). Neither supports real life application. UbD proposes designing backwards in a three-stage sequence starting with what you ultimate goal is, what will demonstrate you achieve it and how are you going to move people towards it.
- 1. Desired results: what should people understand, and what insight should transfer to new situations beyond the training itself?
- 2. Evidence: before designing any learning activity, what would demonstrate that those results have been achieved?
- 3. Learning experience: what activities, content, and structure will help people get there?
Specifying what success looks like before choosing content or format gives every subsequent design decision a reference point. Big ideas and essential questions are what make Stage 1 concrete and that’s where the real design work begins.
Wiggins & McTighe distinguish big ideas from broad abstract categories. “Change” or “resilience” are containers, they encompass a lot of content but don’t tell you anything useful. A big idea is something you think with. It’s closer to a principle than a topic because it has directionality, it tells you where to look and how to organize what you find. Before you can identify a big idea, you need to be clear about what you intend your learning experience to change. What should be different in how people think, feel, or act when it’s over.
To identify big ideas, they propose the “linchpin” test: what is the concept that, if missed, makes the whole topic confusing or impossible to apply? They illustrate this with writing, where the big idea is not “be clear”. It’s audience and purpose, because without knowing who you’re writing for and why, every other skill has no direction.
This way of thinking about instructional intentions is directly useful for workplace learning. UbD invites learning designers and trainers to go beyond key messages like “practice mindfulness,” “communicate openly,” or “embrace change.” Key messages are directive, they tell people what to do. A big idea on the other hand goes further by showing people how things work. It’s a lens that keeps working in situations the training didn’t cover.
Wiggins and McTighe argue that a big idea can’t be transmitted by telling, it has to be designed so that people encounter the need for it themselves. That means designing the experience around a problem or situation where the big idea is the only thing that makes sense of what’s happening, instead of introducing a concept and hoping people will get it.
In workplace training context and conditions are different from K12. However, a big idea can still function as a shared organizing principle powerful enough to give the whole design a center of gravity and something that still holds after the training ends.
“Essential questions foster the kinds of inquiries, discussions, and reflections that help learners find meaning in their learning and achieve deeper thought and better quality in their work” (Wiggins & McTighe).
Essential questions convert a big idea from something to be received into something to be investigated. A question is essential based on its effect in context, not its surface form.
- genuinely arguable
- provoke further inquiry
- require weighing evidence
- stimulate rethinking
- spark personal connections
- recur across contexts.
The most important distinction Wiggins & McTighe make is between essential questions as a teaching move (asking something in class) and as a design move (building the unit around an inquiry so that the whole structure — activities, assessments, discussions — treats the question as genuinely unresolved). “What makes change feel like loss, and what makes it feel like possibility?” is an essential question. “What is resilience?” is not. Essential questions ask for judgment, not for recall. You can ask an essential-sounding question and then proceed to accept a single right answer. Genuine essential questions serve as “doorways” through which people explore key concepts.
Applying to workplace learning
Let’s go back to our initial situation. In a training on change and resilience, while “change management” is a topic, and “build coping skills” is a key message, the big idea is something more in the direction of: “Change and transition are not the same process. Confusing them makes organizational change disorienting”. The essential questions to that could be: “What does it take to actually move on?”, “When does a change become real for the people it happens to?” These questions don’t have a single right answer and recur across restructurings, team changes, and personal setbacks.
In a training on giving and receiving feedback, the topic is “constructive feedback”. The key message might be “be specific and timely.” The big idea could be: “Feedback depends on conditions, not character”. The essential question could be: “What conditions make it possible for someone to actually hear what you’re saying?” There’s no single correct answer to that question, it’s genuinely arguable, and it’s useful far beyond the training room.
Once you are clear about your intention, your big idea and the essential questions around it, you can design learning experiences that support people in discovery, practice and application. That means building in reflection prompts, structured application tasks, and follow-up moments, where people return to the question with a real situation in front of them. Transfer looks like a manager who, before a difficult conversation, asks herself what this person needs in order to be able to listen, rather than just rehearsing what she’s going to say.
A Different Starting Point
Starting with a big idea and essential questions changes what the learning designer is responsible for. We’re not covering topics, but uncovering principles that make learning actually interesting, relevant and worth the investment. UbD perspective invites us to go beyond writing learning objectives, and take time to uncover and craft the questions that will stay with people beyond a one day workshop. They leave training with an insight or a principle for life, instead of a topic. And they got there because someone, somewhere in the design process, asked the right question first.
Wiggins, Grant; McTighe, Jay. Understanding by Design. Expanded Second Edition. Kindle Edition.
Developed in dialogue with Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic). All original concepts and final conclusions are my own.
