Scalable Seasonal
Interpretive Training Curriculum

In 2020 and 2021, I led an intense project to revise the Audience Centered Experience (ACE) curriculum used by the NPS Interpretive Development Program into a more scalable format - focused on integrating the learning at the site-level and bringing the learning to seasonal training cycles.

This birthed the "Scalable Seasonal Interpretive Training Curriculum" - a set of lesson plans and resources designed to be employed by local trainers at the site-level. The sessions were engineered to introduce not only skills, but attitudes.

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Why Scalable?

There just aren’t enough hours in the day to learn everything! This curriculum was created to be scalable - you can teach some elements and not others, you can space the learning out across an entire interpretive season, you can integrate the sessions into periodic staff meetings and enrichment opportunities.

The full scope of sessions is designed to take 4-5 days of instruction. But you can deploy these sessions however you would like - a few at a time spaced out or all at once.

 

Lesson 1: Purposes of a Park Visit

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants differentiate between their own (superfan) motivations for visiting parks and the average visitor’s (not-we) motivations. They have an opportunity to identify the key elements of visitor satisfaction - togetherness, entertainment, and value - in visitor reviews. In addition, the can build practices of empathy for the visitor’s desired experience over the interpreter’s desired experience.

 

Lesson 2: The Power Sources for Interpretive Experiences

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants investigate the difference between Audience Centered and Audience Driven experiences, as well as personally feel the power of Audience Centered experiences as an avenue to deep investigation and inspiration of curiosity within visitors. It uses deep art investigation as a “neutral ground” to help defuse resource-content experts and help them feel the power of a true “visitor” experience.

 

Lesson 3: Recognizing the Hallmarks of Good Interp

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants explore and identify the four elements at play in all successful interpretive experiences and begin seeing how a balance of all four elements creates rich visitor experience. Participants are exposed to the Interpretive Wheel model and its use in building toward successful visitor experience.

Associated Resources

 

Lesson 4: Fostering Your Curiosity

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants discover opportunities and potential barriers for fostering curiosity in others. It allows them space to practice active listening skills and generative questioning. Participants are introduced to hedonic and eudaemonic curiosity.

 

Lesson 5: Speaking to the World Outside the Park

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants define (or redefine) the concept of “relevance” to focus on usefulness in solving larger community and societal issues. It centers an interpretive experience’s primary goal as societal uplift and helping visitors be better actors in their world. Participants also brainstorm ways their interpretive experiences can build skills to confront larger societal issues.

Associated Resources

 

Lesson 6: Getting To Know Yourself

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants establish a trusting and open rapport on a vulnerable topics. The session explores how bias and self awareness relate to interpretation, and how participants can collaborate to shrink blind spots.

 

Lesson 7: Discovering the Plot in our Resources

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Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants explore the possibilities of shorter, more concise narratives to tell whole stories instead of complete stories. The lesson helps them apply the concepts of story arc and narrative to their own site’s resource stories.

Associated Resources

 

Lesson 8: Choosing Macro and Micro Techniques with Purpose

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants explore how an interpretive experience can be structured to help visitors interact and engage with the resource and each other. Participants can discover how the four elements of the Interpretive Wheel offer a lens to select techniques for interpretive experiences - choosing media and techniques based around the needs of the audience and the situation at play, not the interpreter’s desires.

Associated Resources

 

Lesson 9: Catching Each Other as We Stumble

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Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants identify the elements that make peer feedback useful to them. The “Positive, Provision, Specific, and Quality” framework for feedback is a useful tool for making feedback that builds on what is present and can be truly heard by their peers.

Associated Resources

 

Lesson 10: Building Your Pop-up

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants build a first brave example of an interpretive experience to present before their peers. It sets them up for success and works as a “cheerleading” moment to prepare participants to build powerful first examples.

Associated Resources

 

Lesson 11: Is It Consequential and Useful?

Lesson Plan

This session is designed to help participants explore the framework of Essential Theme Questions as a means of achieving relevance. They analyze their interpretive experiments for using the Preamble of the Constitution as a litmus test for their effectiveness and consequence.

Associated Resources

 

NB: These lesson plans appear as originally drafted in March 2021. They were developed by employees of the US federal government, made during the course of the person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, they are in the public domain.