Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form

by Will Thalheimer

This book, Performance-Focused Smile Sheets, completely reimagines the smile sheet as an essential tool to drive performance improvement. Traditional smile sheets (i.e., learner response forms, student reaction forms) don't work! Decades of practice shows them to have negligible benefits. Scientific studies prove that traditional smile sheets are not correlated with learning results! Yet still we rely on smile sheets to make critical decisions about our learning interventions. In this book, Dr. Will Thalheimer carefully builds the case for a new methodology in smile-sheet design. Based on the learning research, Performance-Focused Smile Sheets shows how to write better questions, more focused on performance. The book also shows how to deploy smile sheets to our learners to get valid feedback--feedback that can be used to help us as trainers, instructional designers, teachers, professors, eLearning developers, and chief learning officers build virtuous cycles of continuous improvement.

Genres: Education

165 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2016

Reviews

[Korey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very specific recommendation.

I read this to deepen my understanding in the Learning Experience field. Dr. Thalheimer is down-to-earth and engaging (as an example, he has a section called "Learning Measurement is Pure Sex!"). For this reason, and because his book aims to be extremely practical, I breezed through this. I highly, highly recommend it for anyone in the Instructional Design/ Learning Experience field.

[kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just went to the author’s blog and saw this post entitled Do NOT buy Performance-Focused Smile Sheet Book. He apparently told the publisher to throw all remaining copies in the recycling bin because he’s working on a new edition. Well, I didn’t get the memo and I’d already read and wrote a review of this one, so I’m going to post it anyway. Consider yourself warned.

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Tl;dr: This book has some worthwhile material for instructional designers or anyone evaluating a training program, but the style is irritating and there’s a lot you may want to skip.

I know Will Thalheimer is a big name in the instructional design theory and practice field, but I’ve always had a hard time getting through any of his articles and videos. In this book, his writing style is painfully corny (lots of expletives like “Holy chocolate cannoli, Batman!”) and his aesthetic is early-90s Just-Discovered-PowerPoint Corporate (think text boxes with gradients and borders, and a color palette of navy and bright yellow).

If you can get all past that, however, you will find some decent evaluation questions (aka “smile sheet” questions) and insightful discussion of the pros and cons of using different kinds of questions and the goals they achieve. If you’re already on board with the idea of using evaluation surveys to improve training effectiveness, then you can probably skip the first several chapters and just start at Chapter 6 “Candidate Questions for a Performance-Focused Smile Sheet.”

Many of these questions, however, aren’t user-friendly because they are soooooo long and the language is stuffy and not user-friendly. Everyone knows you have to make a survey short and sweet if you want a user to complete it. I doubt training is an exception. That said, I absolutely see how the long answer choices help you avoid the ambiguities of the likert scale and get actionable feedback.

One other strength of the book is the last couple chapters that help you prepare the data to present and also offer arguments you can use to make the case for improving smile sheets (if you have stakeholders who need convincing).

I wish he had spent more time on real-life examples of the impact these surveys made (e.g. when an organization took action or didn’t). I know he has so much experience in this area, having been a consultant for decades, and I would have loved to hear more of that and less “fluff” language full of “holy batman” and so on.

A word of warning: if you flip through a hard copy of this book, you will see many boxes of sample questions. If you stop to read one of these, do NOT assume it’s an example of a good question! One of the most challenging things about this book are that the majority of the questions he poses aren’t necessarily recommended, but it’s not easy to flip through and find the ones he does recommend.

As much as I find Thalheimer’s style annoying, I still admire him for wanting so badly to raise the instructional design profession above the mediocrity it stagnates in today. I share that goal and welcome the efforts of anyone else who does, too.

[Matthias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both well-researched and funny, this book is a must-read for every learning professional that is serious about her/his job and the field they operate in!

[Christiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-own for any L&D professional

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most powerful book any learning trainer or facilitator can own. I've reread parts of Dr. T's great work many times over. If you are a learning and development professional concerned about on-the-job-performance, you need this book.

[Adrienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for all workplace learning professionals!

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging look at what has become a staple in the learning industry. Implementing the principles within this book and then acting upon the results could fundamentally shift learning design.