Putting the Archimedean Moments into Education

When Kathi MacMillan retired as the Insurance Broker Association of Alberta (IBAA)’s director of education in May 2007, she took along with her many Archimedean moments.

Those “Eureka!” instants of recognition, in which students had some piece of knowledge burned into their consciousness forever, inspired MacMillan to help educate Canada’s insurance brokers for more than 11 years. “Nothing excites me more than when I get up in a classroom and seeing that ‘Ah-hah’ moment,” MacMillan says on the phone from Alberta, resting up after organizing several educations sessions for the IBAA’s 2007 annual general meeting in Jasper. “It gives me goose bumps even thinking about it – when somebody is madly taking notes, thinking they need to memorize what you’re teaching, and suddenly they look up at you – and then you know: ‘I’ve just hit something.'”

MacMillan says the thrill of teaching for her is akin to the feeling a parent has when transmitting a valuable piece of knowledge to a child. “My mother was famous for planting those seeds,” she recalls. “She’d say something and I would say, ‘Well that’s profound,’ and I wasn’t sure why it was profound, but I would hang onto it. Twenty years later it would come back to me, and I would say: ‘Oh Mom, do you remember when you said that to me?’

“I hope I do that with my kids and I hope I do that with the people who participate in my class.”

The IBAA no doubt experienced such an ‘Ah-hah’ moment in 1995, when MacMillan answered the association’s want ad in the newspaper for the brand-new position of IBAA education director. At the time, the IBAA wanted someone with a background in education; an insurance background was not essential to the position. MacMillan brought many years of contract education experience to the table; she had worked previously as an adult educator in the engineering and medical professions alike.

On the basis of a solid interview, IBAA CEO Harold Baker hired MacMillan, who started as the only person in her department. In the early going, MacMillan learned about the insurance profession and arranged to hold about one seminar per month. She said her goal was to do better than break even on the seminars, so that any additional money the education seminars raised would be funnelled back into the promotion of more opportunities.

Within two years, MacMillan organized monthly seminars for each of the management, commercial lines and personal lines segments of the profession. These programs were initially delivered in Calgary and Edmonton, but the diversity of the membership led to the programs being offered throughout the province.

The programs’ success led to the hiring of an additional staff member to help MacMillan. “The department doubled in size,” she says with a laugh. Even before the province introduced mandatory continuing education in 2002, MacMillan had two full-time staff working with her to promote brokers’ education.

When the province’s regulator made continuing education compulsory, the floodgates truly opened; MacMillan quickly seized on the opportunity to bring education to the brokers. She started by delivering within a very short timeframe a four-module IBAC course called ‘Customer First – Customer Service for the Insurance Professional.’ Even though mandatory education was implemented only in September 2002, the idea was for Alberta brokers to have all of their first-term education credits by February of 2003. “Over four months, working Fridays, Saturdays and travelling Sundays, I delivered that to more than 1,000 brokers in Alberta,” she said.

Baker always said he wanted MacMillan to play a “visionary” role as education director, which meant keeping an eye on the proverbial “Big Picture.”

MacMillan therefore turned to observe what the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada (IBAC) was doing in the field of education, noting the national association clearly had an impact on the educational efforts of each province. In this context, MacMillan helped re-format the Customer Service for the Insurance Professional (CSIP) designation courses and participated in the rewrite of IBAC’s Canadian Accredited Insurance Brokers (CAIB) 4 manual, one of four modules that outlines the basic fundamentals of broker education.

MacMillan concedes being involved in something like the rewrite of the CAIB 4 course, which focuses on broker management, might be viewed as being intimately involved with detail work – the kind minutiae that arguably distracts one from the big picture. Nevertheless, she says, “I never ignore the details. I think to ignore the details is to lose the big picture.”

MacMillan clearly felt the big picture included challenging the dominant emphasis at the time on memorization as the chief means of gaining knowledge. She worked hard to force the change of the CAIB 4 exams to better reflect the value of experiential learning and the application of knowledge as an educational approach.

“One of the things I remember learning in university many, many years ago is that memorization in education is dysfunctional,” she says. “There is an element of memorization, but you don’t want people doing a rote recitation of what they have learned, because they haven’t really learned it then. All they’ve done is temporarily store the information and when the need for it is gone, as in exam writing, they walk out doing an information dump, losing everything.”

Instead, MacMillan wanted her students to apply their knowledge in real-world situations. To do this, she worked with IBAC to modify the Canadian Certified Insurance Broker (CCIB) designation testing process, which was being piloted in Alberta at the time.

MacMillan has high praise for the role of role-playing in the CCIB exam process. “I think that role-playing is the true test of what they do every day,” she says. “Brokers are out there presenting their proposals, presenting their solutions to their clients’ insurance problems every day, so let’s test them on that and let’s give positive feedback on how they can do it better.”

As a result of some modifications to the CCIB program, MacMillan said, the exam process took on a life of its own. She recalls having course educators rehearse their roles, getting into character, to prepare for the course training. “I didn’t want them reading from a script,” she said. “The intention was to make the candidate believe they were in a real-life selling situation.”

Using this “method-acting” approach, educators would call on brokers to demonstrate that they had fully internalized the principles they had learned during their careers. “I truly do believe that the people holding that designation under this current exam process have really stepped outside of their comfort zone during that test process,” MacMillan said. “That’s horribly intimidating, to be tested by your peers. Every one of these [brokers] rose to the occasion and I think that speaks highly of their willingness to accept a challenge and to prove themselves, and demonstrates a belief in what they are doing.”

MacMillan cites as one of her crowning achievements a project she initially undertook at the behest of the nation’s insurance regulators in 1999. She helped put together the Professional Development Handbook of Broker Skills, which could be characterized as something like a bible on broker education. MacMillan describes it as a “foundational document.” The document is nothing less than the identification of all of the different positions and roles in the insurance industry, and the skill sets required to function in each role effectively. The object is to identify the skills required of everyone in the industry, so that future courses will be designed with a clear view towards inculcating and testing those skills.

Given all of this activity around educating brokers, what does one do in retirement? MacMillan plans to use the time to exhale and spend some time with family. But it doesn’t appear the industry is quite ready to let MacMillan go. She has discussed contracting with a few of the IBAA’s
sister associations on specific projects planned for the future, including some contract work. And of course MacMillan plans to continue her own personal quest to learn. “People are limited only by what they believe,” she says. “And how do you change your belief system? I believe it’s by gaining knowledge.”