A new voice in the room
Day 3 opened with a new trainer: Martin — "no sir, no mister, because if you call me sir or mister I feel very old." German, from a town an hour and a half outside Munich, graduated as a mechanical design engineer, moved to Malaysia into oil and gas, became a technical manager, finished a Master of Science in innovation and technology management last year, and has been with Exzellent Profis since 2020. His territory is engineering product development, design thinking and creativity — he runs commercialisation workshops for MRANTI and a long-running design thinking series with Taylor's University. A completely different instrument from our Day 1–2 trainer: where she teaches in stories and Malay asides, Martin teaches like an engineer — criteria, structure, and a running commentary on exactly how Friday's assessment will be scored. He had also clearly done his homework on us. Scanning the room during introductions: "Who is Dave? You make always the nice summary. I like that." Apparently my end-of-day recaps have a reputation. No pressure at all.
Sam Loyd's horses
The ice breaker was three small cards from our workbook pack: two sad, lame-looking horses and a narrow strip with two riders. The task: arrange the three cards — no folding, no bending, no tearing — so that you get two flying horses with a rider on each. This is Sam Loyd's trick mules puzzle, first printed in the 1870s, when P.T. Barnum paid Loyd ten thousand dollars to rename it "P.T. Barnum's Trick Mules" and sold millions of cards outside his circus. A hundred and fifty years later it still humbles a room of adults before ten in the morning. The 2026 clause arrived within a minute, aimed squarely at people like me: "Now I need to give a warning — please don't ask AI how to solve this problem." We struggled honestly instead. The trick, when it finally lands, is that the horses go back to back and the rider strip turns ninety degrees across them — and suddenly the two lame horses are galloping with a rider each. Nothing was added. Nothing was cut. The same three pieces, arranged correctly, produce something the pieces themselves don't show. Then he cashed the metaphor: "Why we use this example here is because in training we need to talk about alignment." Every element of a course already exists in our toolkit after two days — outcomes, methods, assessments. Whether they make a flying horse or a lame donkey is purely a question of arrangement.
The triangle
"Training has three major alignments: learning outcome, training activities and assessment must be aligned — these three elements." This is constructive alignment, the framework John Biggs proposed in 1996: learners construct meaning through what they do, so the verb in the outcome must be activated in the activity and verified by the assessment. All three corners pull one direction or the course pulls apart. The mechanics run straight through Bloom's verbs from Day 2. Write a cognitive-domain outcome — define, describe, explain — and you are promising a form of talking or writing: the natural activity is a lecture plus discussion, and the natural assessment is a quiz. Write a psychomotor verb — demonstrate, repair, assemble — and you have promised hands: the activity must be a demonstration and the assessment must be practical, individually assessed. "If you write your learning outcome demonstrate — whatever, full-arm tying a tie — and you run only a lecture, you don't get your points. I cannot give you your points. Because from your learning outcome you are not aligned with what you have to do." Same topic, written as explain with a lecture and a quiz: full marks. The scoring is not about the topic at all. It is about whether the three cards line up. My margin note from this stretch is one line: the verb is a contract. Whatever you write in the outcome, the session and the assessment must pay it in full.
Stories from the assessor's chair
Martin assesses these fifteen-minute sessions for a living, and his examples were a parade of past participants. The medical doctor who runs a high-end clinic and demonstrated his personal six-step method for folding the soft cotton towels his patients get: preparation, his own demonstration, one towel handed to every participant for practice, then a one-minute individual evaluation — pass criteria measured with a ruler against the folded length and width. "Don't ask for micrometer measurement. Too complicated." Simple process, observable criteria, full alignment. The lady during MCO who taught sushi online — and wisely wrote explain as her outcome, described the elements, demonstrated the rolling herself and closed with a quiz. Had she written demonstrate, she would have had to ship an ingredient pack to every participant's house so they could roll individually. One verb, an entire logistics chain. And the brisk-walking trainer he still talks about: she taught proper form, demonstrated, lined everyone up to walk the room and back, then assessed against criteria she had designed to be observable — each step longer than one floor tile, opposite arm to leg — ticking a clipboard as they walked. "She was one of the highest score sessions I ever did. She just followed what is in the assessment criteria." His own counter-example was the most instructive. For a ten-minute gamification session, he had to choose: let participants play the AR game live, or show a recording of the game being played? He recorded. "Because I cannot control the time. Some can log in fast, some take longer, maybe Wi-Fi not good, then they complain — you have a lot of challenges to settle in ten minutes." His outcome was never that people play the game — so the video plus questions about what they observed achieved it with zero risk. Choosing what not to run live is also alignment.
Friday tactics
Half the morning was really a briefing for Friday's fifteen-minute assessed session, delivered with the bluntness of someone who has watched every possible failure. Video: one to one-and-a-half minutes maximum, and never at the end — "you can never buy back the time. I have people who show video at the end, then suddenly they have seventeen minutes." His own record for discipline: problem statement on screen at fifty-three seconds, session closed at 9:59, full marks — and participants who follow the advice land at 14 minutes 55 seconds like clockwork. Assessment: individual, always. The clean trick is a Google Form behind a QR code — participants scan, you confirm everyone has answered-ish, and mercifully "you don't need to wait till everyone has answered." No form skills? Three questions on paper, and EP will print them for you. What scores almost nothing: three questions on a PowerPoint slide answered by whoever volunteers — "not considered individual assessment," one or two points at best. Methods: never a pure fifteen-minute lecture — "I also feel very bored, I sit there fifteen minutes, I only hear the talking" — at minimum add a discussion, the second most used element in training because it works for any topic. And HRD Corp will not accredit a trainer who stands and talks for two hours; activities are not decoration, they are the requirement. Language: English or Bahasa or rojak — but not Chinese, per HRD Corp's rules for the recorded assessment, though your actual training later can run in any language you like. Martin has assessed sessions in languages he doesn't speak: "I just look at the participants. If they look at you like that — I know you talk nonsense. I don't need to understand your language." Comprehension is visible from the outside. That one is going in my permanent file.
Case Study
aligning the front desk
Tonight's audit target: how we "train" check-in at Mana Mana. Our actual method is shadowing — a new front-desk hire watches a senior do it for a few shifts, then one day the desk is theirs. Run through today's triangle, it fails at every corner. There is no written outcome, so there is nothing to align. The implicit outcome is pure psychomotor — perform the full walk-in check-in — but the activity is passive observation and the assessment is nothing at all, just the absence of complaints. That is a demonstrate outcome served by a watch activity and verified by hope. The realigned version writes itself once the verb is chosen. Outcome: demonstrate the complete walk-in check-in — verification, deposit, key card, welcome script — unassisted. Activity: an actual demonstration in four steps, PPPE from Day 2 — the duty manager prepares the context, presents the flow once at real speed and once narrated, then the new hire practises on three mock guests, including the awkward ones: no booking record, disputed deposit. Assessment: individual and observable, brisk-walking style — a clipboard checklist where every criterion can be seen from a metre away: ID checked before payment taken, deposit logged before key cut, name used twice, lift directions given. Pass or repeat, same shift. The sushi lesson applies too. If I ever move parts of this training online for pre-arrival onboarding, the verb has to downgrade honestly: a video module can support explain the check-in flow with a quiz — it cannot support demonstrate, because there is no desk in a Google Form. One verb decides the whole delivery model. I have been designing check-in training as if the arrangement of the pieces didn't matter, and the pieces were lame donkeys the whole time.
Reflections
The elegant thing about today's opening is that the puzzle is the theory. Nothing in the horse cards is added or removed to get the flying horses — and nothing new was added to our toolkit this morning. Outcomes we learned to write on Day 2, methods we toured all afternoon, assessments we start tomorrow: today only supplied the arrangement rule. Biggs called it constructive alignment; Martin's poster calls it design for success, not by chance; the cards call it two flying horses instead of two lame donkeys. And for the first time, the course showed us its own scoring hand: Friday is not a talent show, it is an alignment check with a rubric. Write one honest verb, build the one activity that activates it, close with the one assessment that verifies it, inside fifteen minutes. Same pieces as everyone else. Arrangement decides.