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Megan R. Bell is the manager of division operations in the strategy and diversified business division at the Blue Cross NC; meganrbell@yahoo.com.

Megan Bell

November 2023 - TD Magazine

Foster a productive midday learning session and increase engagement with this well-balanced menu of best practices.

No Soggy Lunch & Learns

Megan Dillon is a manager of instructional design. She has experience developing and overseeing successful onboarding, continuous education, and leadership development programs across various industries. Megan believes L&D have the potential to empower individuals to perform at optimal levels. She is passionate about developing strategic learning programs that inspire, motivate, and create change across entire organizations.Megan grew up in Charlotte, NC, and graduated from Queens University of Charlotte. She resides in Charlotte, NC, with her husband and two busy little boys.

Megan Dillon

Megan Kohler is an assistant teaching professor and learning designer at Pennsylvania State University. She specializes in crafting online, technology-enhanced, and blended learning experiences. Recognized for her quality design work, Kohler is a recipient of the Marion G. Mitchell Award for Innovative Teaching. Kohler is a seasoned leader in education, having served in numerous roles with the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference, including overall conference co-chair, program co-chair, and chair of presenter services. She has also served on EDUCAUSE’s Courseware Advisory Board, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Kohler’s research, supported by a Schreyer Institute Scholarship, focuses on supporting neurodivergent learners in higher education. As a 2024 Teach Access Fellow, Kohler advocates for inclusive and accessible learning experiences for all students, especially those with neurocognitive differences. Her research on neurodiversity and her book The Multidisciplinary Instructional Designer, has been featured in numerous podcasts and conferences.

Megan Kohler

Megan Galloway is the talent development manager for U.S. Engineering Company Holdings. She believes that all companies can unlock fulfillment and engagement for their people with the right tools and conversations.

Megan Galloway

The next time you feel angry, take the presidential route to expressing your emotions.

Take a Moment to Check Your Emotions

How do I become successful? How do I advance my career? How do I become the best possible me in the workplace? We have all asked these questions, and have tormented ourselves with trying to find the right answers. While there is no right answer, there is a place to start—figuring out who you are. Now, Discover Your Strengths, written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, allows you to take an assessment to discover and benefit from your strengths.Many people go through their daily work accomplishing task after task, with an inkling of what they are good at or what they enjoy. However, do we take those insights and mold our career around them? Maybe, maybe not. Now, Discover Your Strengths focuses on the idea that people should capitalize on their strengths and manage around their weaknesses. This means we should take what we are good at and flourish versus spending time trying to better our faults.As a society, we are used to the notion that we need to be good at everything, but in reality, that isn’t possible. No matter how hard we try, there will always be things that we are not good at. So, why do we waste our time on things that are not our strengths? The book is not suggesting that you should never try something you don’t believe you will succeed at, instead it encourages you to get to know what you are good at and truly use it to your advantage.Now, Discover Your Strengths comes with a unique code for you to take Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder Assessment online. From the assessment you’ll discover your top five of the 34 strengths that they have developed. These strengths range from achiever to communicator to learner and so forth. Once you are aware of your top five, you can use the book to figure out what your strengths mean and how to put them to work.The book describes each strength, as well as the individuals that usually possess them. For many, reading this information is like looking into a mirror because it provides words to describe the actions and mindset that come naturally for them. For example, one of my strengths was learner, which in the book is described as, “The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning.” For me, nothing could be more true: I try to gather information constantly and learn as much as I can about everything around me. Knowing your strengths and learning how to implement them can be a personal catalyst for change at work.Now, Discover Your Strengths also dives into how to manage people regarding the 34 themes. It explains how to manage people with various strengths and suggests steps a manager can take to help that person succeed.It is vital to know who you are to advance within your career. It is even more important to ensure that you are spending your time working on items that coincide with your strengths. Now, Discover Your Strengths will help you realize your potential and drive realistic results within your career.ATD young professionals are encouraged to get involved and submit content to ATD blogs. Find more information about how you can share your content.

Discover Your Strengths

When you recognize your own talents and understand yourself and your own biases, you will become more confident. You will then be able to see past others’ biases and improve communication and avoid or manage conflict. Effective communication starts with an accurate perception—a perception of what the person meant by their words and actions. How do you know if your perception is accurate? It quickly becomes clear when you get angry, annoyed, aggravated, offended, insulted, and so on. Our perceptions are naturally biased; what affects our perceptions are our beliefs, values, and past life experiences—and everyone’s are unique. This is the kind of unconscious bias this webcast will focus on. The presenter will show you a few exercises and tools to help your trainees understand their biases and check their perception in daily interactions, including how to use a global organizational assessment tool to assess individual beliefs, values, and preferences.
When you are aware of what is influencing your view of the world and of others, you can take control of it. You will start to see your communication and relationships improve and will be better able to manage conflict.
In this webcast you will learn:

to recognize your own biases
to become more aware of your perception and its impact on communication
some exercises and tools to use in your training.


Unconscious Bias: What Does It Have to Do With Communication and Conflict Management?

Do you think virtual reality (VR) training is too expensive, complicated, and requires a headset? Think again!
Resistance to change and dated beliefs mean companies are missing out on the benefits of immersive learning, despite overwhelming evidence that VR training can achieve better outcomes. Discover how simple and affordable VR can be.
During this webinar, you will learn how to:

Work efficiently with 360-degree images and video to create content.
Create content that can be used on the web and in VR.
Distribute immersive content to your learners.


DEMO: Create, Publish, and Deliver Immersive Learning in 30 Minutes

ATD Blog

While facilitating leadership development workshops at Emerson (a Fortune 125 company with 90,000 employees in 140 countries), there is an interesting comment I frequently hear: “I did not realize how much time you would give me in this workshop to think!”Is that a compliment or a complaint? I believe most people mean it as a compliment because they are surprised. Most of them haven’t had enough time to think in prior trainings.I’ve heard this comment many times, and it never takes me by surprise. In fact, I would be disappointed if I did not hear it. Most learners aren’t given adequate time to think and reflect when they attend training sessions.Far too many training programs rely on content rather than application and do not offer learners time for intentional reflection. In my 28-year learning and development career, I’ve seen too many programs approach learning by telling learners as much as possible in the time provided. Many of us in L&D call that strategy “ten pounds of training in a five-pound sack.”Fred Harburg, former chief learning officer at Fidelity Investments, sums it up well: “If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”L&D professionals want to create value for learners. One of the most valuable activities we can build into the design and delivery of our courses is intentional reflection and implementation planning. To improve our training programs, we must stop talking and pushing content, and let learners think.This represents a paradigm shift for many L&D practitioners. Spend less time on content and more time on intentional thinking and reflection.L&D thought leaders Roy Pollock, Cal Wick, and Andy Jefferson (authors of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning) popularized the term “learning scrap.” Learning scrap refers to content covered in a workshop that is never applied. Most L&D programs have a typical learning scrap rate of 85 percent. At best, most learners apply 15 percent of what’s taught in a workshop on the job. If you want to decrease learning scrap and increase learning transfer, build more deliberate thinking and reflection activities into your courses.In his classic book, Learning and Memory, Donald A. Norman writes, “To remember is to have managed three things successfully: the acquisition, the retention, and the retrieval of information. Failure to remember means failure at managing one of these three things.” I argue failure usually occurs at the retention level. If there is no reflection, there is no retrieval. If there is no reflection and retention, do not expect retrieval to follow.This issue is well-documented by Ruth C. Clark, Frank Nguyen, and John Sweller in another classic book, Efficiency in Learning. They refer to this concept as “information fatigue.” We need to give learners more time to process during a training program. The authors’ research shows a lack of time for reflection leads to cognitive overload. Overload implies a malfunction; learning is short-circuited. If a person attends a program to learn, and we cram it full of content without giving them time to think, it’s no wonder learning scrap occurs.Several years ago, I codeveloped a workshop with Michael Watkins (a former faculty member at Harvard Business School and founder of Genesis Advisers) to create a workshop based on his bestselling book, The First 90 Days. Our workshop designed intentional thinking activities that asked participants a series of questions at the end of each module. The reflection activities took between 20 and 30 minutes to complete and consisted of five or six questions. These were not simply recall or comprehension questions, but rather synthesis and evaluation questions (the higher levels of cognitive thinking).Some of the top executives who attended this workshop told me that if I had not built in deliberate time to think, their goal would have been to rush through the course so they could move on to the next thing on their list.Here are some ways to build time for reflection into your programs:
Build thinking time into the design and delivery of every learning program you create, no matter the delivery method (in person or virtual).Resist the temptation to add more content to your courses. Do not fall prey to the “myth of more.” More content at the expense of intentional time for reflection will not improve learner performance. It will diminish it.Remember, the goal is not to give the content. The goal is for learners to get it, which will only happen through the discipline of quiet reflection.If trainers are given the option to talk or let their learners think, many would choose to fill the silence with their own voices, but the greatest value trainers bring to a workshop is knowing when to stop speaking and give learners time to reflect.

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