HOLLY R. HENRY

Learning Strategy and Solutions

Most learning design starts with content: what to teach, how to deliver it, and whether learners can show they received it. That approach works when the goal is information transfer. It falls short when the goal is judgment, when people need to make sound decisions under real constraints with incomplete information and consequences that matter.

REAL is a strategic design framework built for that harder problem. It treats learning as an intervention in real work, not preparation for it, and it provides a structured basis for deciding what to build, what to cut, and where learning effort will actually change how people perform.

The REAL Framework

REAL is not a set of design preferences. It is a framework for making strategic decisions about learning: what to prioritize, where to invest, and when a proposed solution is the wrong one. Each principle functions as a decision criterion, a basis for choosing one design direction over another when constraints force tradeoffs.

The ideas behind REAL are not new. Learning designers have long valued relevance, experience, authenticity, and learner agency. What REAL contributes is the insistence that these function together as strategic decision criteria, not aspirations. They are filters applied when scope must be narrowed, investments must be justified, and comfortable design defaults must be questioned.

REAL builds on a foundation in constructivist and problem-centered learning, particularly work on authentic complexity, ill-structured problems, and the role of learner reasoning in developing expertise. That tradition focused on how to design learning environments that support deep thinking. REAL extends those ideas into the decision layer: not just how to design learning, but whether, where, and what to prioritize given the constraints of real practice.

Relevant

Anchored in learners' existing knowledge, experience, or immediate interests.

Relevance is a design constraint, not a motivational tool. It determines what earns its place in the curriculum and what gets cut.

What is the minimum viable scope that will actually change performance?

Experiential

Structured around action, practice, and the consequences of doing.

Learning happens through action and consequence, not through being told. If learners are practicing recall instead of practicing the work, the design is wrong.

Does this design produce learning through doing, or does it assume exposure is enough?

Authentic

Aligned with the conditions, constraints, and stakes of real operating contexts.

The gap between the learning environment and the real operating environment must be small enough that transfer holds. Strip away the real constraints and you train people for work that does not exist.

Will what is learned here hold up where performance actually matters?

Learner-Centered

Shaped by learner judgment, choice, and agency.

The designer's job is not to control the path but to design conditions under which good decisions become more likely. Learners must exercise judgment no curriculum can fully prescribe.

Does this design develop the capacity to decide, or the capacity to follow?

Selected Work

The work begins where familiar solutions stop holding up against real operating conditions: systems, scale, risk, and time. Each case reflects deliberate prioritization among competing demands.

Deciding what to remove when training must support real work under pressure

Corporate technical training · global IT support organization

The request was simple: reduce escalations. The reality was anything but. Distributed help desks, live systems, and no appetite for expensive vendor training that did not resemble the work. The real decision was what not to teach when judgment mattered more than coverage.

See how the decision was made

Deciding how to assess judgment at scale without relying on recall

Undergraduate course assessment and learning design - sociology

When problems allow more than one defensible answer, grading gets slippery fast. This work started from a different question: what if assessment made learners’ reasoning visible instead of trying to score it? The design choices followed from that shift.

Follow the reasoning

Deciding when problems should not be fully defined

Undergraduate course redesign · materials science

Engineers make sense of messy, real problems, but engineering students are often rewarded for plug and chug. They learn to extractnumbers from a word problem and apply a formula, even when real design decisions involve competing constraints like weight, durability, and environmental conditions. The decision was whether to keep rewarding procedural completion or to redesign the course around problems that required judgment about what would actually work.

See the tradeoffs