Training from the BACK of the Room! (TBR)

Why Use Blackout Bingo?

How do you prepare workshop participants for important information to come? A common way is to verbally take them through an agenda on a slide or flip chart. So, you’ve welcomed people and blah-ed your way through the agenda. How involved were your participants while they passively sat there and listened to your blahs? Once they sat and listened, did any of it resonate with them? Who knows? Did they engage with the content and make it their own? There’s an outside possibility they did, but truthfully, they probably didn’t.

Another way to prepare participants is to provide a handout. You distribute the handout while giving a spoken overview of why the handout is important. Perhaps you even ask the participants to flag certain pages and they do just that. Or maybe they don’t. Rather than pay attention to you, they might ignore everything you are saying as they flick their way through the handout. Maybe they flick through the handout as they think, “I can go back to sleep now.”

What’s the problem with these two scenarios? While you as a trainer are active, the participants are passive. Undeniably, there’s nothing in these two approaches which turns the passive listener into an active learner. How can we fix that? Blackout Bingo is a great way to do just that!

What is Blackout Bingo?

A popular activity we use in our “Training from the BACK of the Room” Practitioner Class is “Blackout Bingo.” You can read about Blackout Bingo in Sharon Bowman’s books The Ten-Minute Trainer (pp 128) or Using Brain Science To Make Training Stick (pp 225). We’ll also have a look at the activity here, as well.

The game of Bingo is a popular in many countries around the world, so it is probably familiar to you. Briefly, Wikipedia describes Bingo as “a game of probability in which players mark off numbers on cards as the numbers are drawn randomly by a caller, the winner being the first person to mark off all their numbers.”

Blackout Bingo uses this same idea, but rather than using numbers, it uses important concepts that will be covered in your workshop session.

How to Play Blackout Bingo: 

So let’s look at how Blackout Bingo works …

Materials:

• A standard size piece of paper (A4 or Letter) per participant.
• Marker pen per participant.
• List of concepts printed on a slide or flip chart.
• (Optional) small prizes (one per participant).

Instructions:

To play Blackout Bingo, follow these steps:

1. Hold up a piece of paper and ask participants to copy you.
2. Fold the piece of paper lengthways along its centre and wait for the participants to do the same.
3. Fold the piece of paper width-wise along its centre and wait for the participants to do the same.
4. Fold the piece of paper one more time. You should have a small square of folded paper. Wait for the participants to do the same.
5. Open the paper to reveal the sheet which is now separated by folds into 8 boxes.
6. Invite the participants to draw lines over the folds on their sheets in order to divide their sheets into 8 outlined boxes.
7. Explain that they are going to be playing a game of Blackout Bingo during the workshop.
8. Tell them that in a moment, you will show them a list of concepts (printed on a slide or flipchart) that will be covered during the workshop. When you show them the list, participants are to silently read and then mentally select the 8 that sound most interesting to each of them.
9. Each participant will then write their chosen 8 concepts down on their sheet of paper, one concept per box. This means that each learner’s Blackout Bingo sheet will be different from the others.
10. Tell them that, as the workshop progresses, the first time that you mention a concept on their “bingo card”, they should cross the concept out.
11. Once they have crossed out ALL of their 8 concepts, they wave their sheet in the air and shout “Bingo!” (Demonstrate this as you explain it). Emphasize that it doesn’t matter what is happening at that moment – they just shout out the word and wave their sheet in the air.
12. Ask the participants to demonstrate this back to you – if they don’t do it with much energy, joke with them about it and invite them to try again with a little more enthusiasm!
13. Say that when someone shouts “Bingo!” then everyone should give that person a round of applause. If you have prizes to hand out, give one to each learner when they get a bingo.
14. Now reveal the concept list and ask the participants to review the list,  choose the 8 that sound most interesting, and to write those down on their bingo sheets.
15. Check that everyone has their Blackout Bingo sheet filled in and then continue with the workshop.
16. Wait for the inevitable shouts of “Bingo!” Be sure to pause for applause and prize-giving!

Conclusion:

I hope you can see how Blackout Bingo increases the interest and curiosity of the your workshop participants before the session begins. The activity “primes” learners for the learning to come by inviting them to review the content list and then to decide what concepts sound most important to them. Participants choose and write down their most important concepts. Finally participants pay greater attention to what is being discussed in case one of their concepts is mentioned. The bonus prize for everyone? Blackout Bingo is a lot of fun!

Find Out More:

You can find more variations of the Blackout Bingo activity in Sharon Bowman’s books The Ten-Minute Trainer and Using Brain Science To Make Training Stick.

Alternatively, you can read more about Blackout Bingo in the PDF article titled Drawing a Blank from the Free Articles page of Sharon’s website.