Practice makes perfect — that is why you will see two occasions in this course where participants get the opportunity to design and deliver their own training sessions. This first one is only a short practice a minutes training module but should be sufficient for your participants to apply training design principles, practice the art of delivering in front of other participants, and get candid feedback on their performance.
Trainees should co-deliver in pairs, and you should make sure that each pair has a trainer from your team observing the session. Depending on the number of your trainees — in our case, 16 trainees — this probably requires two rounds of delivery. One small but very important thing is to make sure that you have volunteers not trainees organized who will attend the Practice Training sessions, so every trainee has an opportunity to practice in front of a real audience.
The goal is fairly straightforward here: get a real delivery experience after trainees have built up their session design, and then provide detailed feedback on their performance so they know what to focus on for their Final Training at the end of the course.
There is so much that must be done for an engaging training session beyond just a trainer stepping on the stage, sharing knowledge and facilitating exercises. The truth is, many of the subjects that we touch upon this day can be their own subjects of advanced train the trainer events.
Debriefing an experiential learning exercise, group facilitation and team dynamics — each are highly complex topics, and covering them in-depth during a single day is not a realistic endeavour. Now, consider that your trainees are on their fourth day of a really intense learning experience, and they still have their final training delivery session in front of them. What you really want here is to give them instantly actionable knowledge and tips in order to make their deliveries properly interactive.
After they graduate from this starter train the trainer course and have already delivered a few dozen training sessions of their own, then it is probably the right time to dig deeper into the subtler aspects of experiential learning and group dynamics. By then, your trainees will have their own real-life experience to reflect upon.
So, here are the topics we would include if we had one single day to spend on training essential interaction skills for new trainers:. This session will focus on teaching the fundamentals of how to arrange the classroom to facilitate an interactive learning experience.
A set of flip charts full of post-it notes created by participants themselves during exercises can provide a sense of creativity and progress. Table and chair arrangements likewise affect the learning process, as do the kinds of settings you use for group work and individual presentations.
It is essential to have enough room for people to do interactive exercises in groups without feeling chained to their seats. Therefore, participants will be taught how to arrange the space so it helps achieve the desired outcome. This includes the important aspect of selecting the room and arranging seating classroom, circle, semi-circle, breakout groups , tables, visuals, and so on.
A thoughtful design of the training room is an important aspect of facilitating learning, and here are the more common types of room arrangements, recapped by Beth Kanter :. During this session, if location permits, try out the various set-ups with your participants. Discuss the characteristics of each room set-up and which arrangements are best for which activities.
To keep a group of participants engaged throughout a training session, a trainer needs to have a solid toolkit of facilitation techniques at hand. Using different group facilitation techniques is essential to having a balanced interaction during a training session. If your participants sit in a theater-style arrangement during a whole session, sooner or later you will hear snoring sounds.
Likewise, if you only switch between plenary discussion and individual work, your participants might get bored of the monotony. That is why your trainees should be aware of the most frequently-used methods to facilitate interaction within a group:. There are also practical combinations of the techniques above, such as the Dialogue method, idea generation techniques and decision-making techniques.
Optionally, you may also introduce the VAK Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learning Styles concept as a supplementary theory to help trainees in thinking about how to keep a session interactive for participants with varying learning styles. When people from different backgrounds and life experiences meet to go through an intense learning event, there will inevitably be various reactions. Some might sit back, others will fully engage, and there will be some who will adopt blocking roles.
This is a natural response to some sessions or specific tasks, so it is important that trainees be prepared to handle such situations. It gives a handy framework for letting participants brainstorm rules or guidelines for handling different kinds of disruptive behaviours. Participants from Hell train-the-trainer disruptive participants thiagi structured sharing issue analysis. Different teams receive envelopes labeled with different types of disruptive participants. Participants brainstorm guidelines for handling disruptive behaviours, record the guidelines on a card, and place the card inside the envelope.
Teams rotate the envelopes and generate guideline cards for handling other types of disruptive participants. During the evaluation round, team members review the guideline cards generated by other teams and identify the top five suggestions.
If you want participants to achieve long-lasting learning in any training event, then experiential learning is a very effective way to do that.
In this segment, your trainees will practice how to brief and debrief an experiential learning activity.. Debriefing is the key that enables participants to identify and connect lessons from workshop or training activities to their real world.
We suggest a practical debriefing exercise for this: conduct a real experiential exercise during this session, then focus on the experience of how the briefing and the debriefing were done by the trainers. This way participants will have the chance to first take part in a debriefing as participants and then analyse the experience they just had.
Using questions is essential during a training session, especially during a debriefing session. Give an overview of good questioning techniques and how to ask questions properly. Group dynamics play an important role not just in the training room but in our everyday lives, too.
As a trainer, it is highly useful to be conscious of the dynamics taking place in the group and to be aware of the best ways to deal with a group depending on its dynamics.
In this session, therefore, we introduce the topic of group dynamics and its influence on the training process. A minute session, as scheduled in our template agenda, gives only enough time to scratch the surface of this topic. Actually, this is an excellent topic for an advanced train the trainer course, where participants already have hundreds of training hours behind them and thus many personal experiences to refer to.
This theory also supports a common view on how a trainer should react throughout each stage of the process. For example, you may decide to deliver a sharing and reflection session so participants can reflect on their own group development supported by elements of group dynamics theory. By this point, your trainees have gone through over four very intense days of learning and self-development. It is time to give them a short break before they set out to prepare their Final Training which they will deliver the following day.
It might be tempting for you to try squeezing in more content with another session in the morning. However, our experience is that trainees do reach the tipping point by this day, and some real mental rest helps them to process the learnings of the course so far.
Offering individual free time is one way to go; however if your setting allows, it is best to organise a group leisure activity — something that keeps trainees both physically and mentally busy e. Fresher minds will be more effective in tackling the job. Since this Final Training Delivery will also be done in pairs — everyone will deliver with a co-trainer — you need to make sure that pairs and their topics are chosen in advance.
As the trainer of the course, it is your responsibility to facilitate this process. If you prefer, you can directly assign pairs that challenge participants in a healthy way. Create pairs with complementing strengths, so each person can learn something from the other in the training design and delivery process. Or you might poll participants by the topics that each of them prefers to deliver.
After pairs and topics are set, trainees can start preparing for the Final Training Delivery, which will be a 2-hour training session. There is half a day dedicated for preparations. Make sure to have a mentor assigned to each pair who will keep an eye on the training design process. Mentors help whenever trainees are stuck and should make sure that everyone gets a sound training agenda designed by the end of the day. Lastly, the Final Training Deliveries will take place in two rounds where everyone will be the trainer in one of the rounds and a participant in the other.
To help trainees sign up themselves, create a schedule of the Final Deliveries so everyone can see when they deliver their session and so they can also sign up as participants for one of the sessions in another time slot. Make sure that you get further participants for the Final Deliveries the following day, not only your trainees, and that those people are also distributed evenly between the Final Deliveries.
This is the last day of our program, and time for trainees to put into practice everything they have learnt over the past days. The highlight of this day is the Final Training Delivery, where trainees conduct one more session to practice their freshly-gained interaction skills and to implement the feedback they received from their first delivery.
Similarly to the Practice Training three days before, the scheduling of these sessions depends on the time you have available and the size of your team.
Trainees should again deliver in pairs to practice the experience of co-delivery, and it is essential that one trainer from your team is there to observe and give feedback on the performance. In our example template with 16 participants, we have split the Final Training sessions into two rounds of 2-hour deliveries, each followed by a round of feedback. You may even decide to record the session if you want to provide really thorough feedback by your whole team of trainers.
The ideal length of this session is somewhere between 2 and 4 hours — that should give trainees a thorough and hands-on experience of how it feels to deliver a complete session. This is the main assignment of the course, and completing it will provide your participants with a sense of accomplishment and closing.
Your trainees have practically completed the course and passed their Final Delivery by this point. This is just the beginning of their journey as a trainer, and now it is time to point out the various development opportunities they will have in your organisation. You may provide them with a detailed survey soliciting answers around the various aspects of the event and their learning journey.
These evaluations should give you useful insights on how to adjust the agenda and scope of your train the trainer event next time. Lastly, prepare a nice, official closing ceremony for your trainees and hand out certificates for completing the course. They went through a really intense learning process and hopefully built bonds with their fellow trainees that will support them in their upcoming careers as trainers.
Your trainees worked hard! Now celebrate the beginning of their journey as a trainer! If you are new to the concept, a train the trainer course can be difficult to get your head around.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions associated with the train the trainer approach. Simply put, train the trainer is a learning method where a group is trained on a subject while also being taught the skills and capabilities they need to pass that training on to others. The purpose of train the trainer is to not only share skills with the group being trained but enabling those people to then pass those skills on to even more people. Train the trainer teaches people the skills they need to be effective trainers and facilitators so they can pass on their training to others effectively.
Good managers are not necessarily good trainers, and so train the train is designed to bridge that potential skill gap and make for healthier, better-trained teams.
Train the trainer is important for ensuring everyone doing training has the skills to do the best job they can and ensure that any training programs stick — saving time and money in the long run. Training the trainer makes for more effective managers and trainers, thus leading to better teams and stronger organizations. One of the dangers for any team is a siloing of skillsets and knowledge.
Staff will inevitably have areas of focus or ownership, but there are always competencies that should be proliferated throughout a team or organization in order to be at your most productive. It should be a given that training is important.
Training the trainer means that you are ensuring those training sessions are effective and beneficial to everyone involved.
The best train the trainer courses and programs may contain bespoke materials tailored to the industry, organization, and group the trainer is working with, though there are some key elements that should be present in every train the trainer course and which you should consider when designing or building your course. Start with identifying the purpose of your training program. Though this is broadly the same for all train the trainer courses in that you are teaching the skills people need to be effective trainers, the specifics of the group and organization will require some bespoke elements.
Every train the trainer course will likely have larger organizational goals and objectives behind the initiative which will need to be taken into account.
This often means factoring in the needs and other commitments of the group and choosing the right type of train the trainer course. You will also want to ensure that you select the right people to be in the room and that the group is the correct one for your train the trainer program.
Start with a template or follow the train the trainer examples and outline above to get a sense of what needs to be included. You will want to ensure to include a mix of training and activities that not only teach your group the skills they need to be effective trainers but keep them engaged.
Keep the purpose and group in mind when designing your course. Remember each of the skills you want to develop and ensure that and you cover each of these in your agenda.
Use a planning tool to make the course design process easy. Not everyone tasked with delivering training has all the skills to be a great trainer. Here are some of the most important skills you need to be a trainer and to deliver effective training, whether you are running a train the trainer course or delivering standard training to a team. Successful trainers use a variety of skills, techniques, and methods to be at the top of their game.
Here are some tips for being a successful trainer. I hope you enjoyed this train the trainer design guide and that it gave you some inspiration. Keep in mind, there are a lot of different options for designing and running a train the trainer program. You can have shorter events, or you can have a more extended program scattered over several weeks.
You may go more in-depth on certain topics, such as learning styles or group dynamics, and you may set aside some topics as follow-up rounds in the form of an advanced train the trainer course. You may even combine online and offline learning in a course. You might even transition to virtual training!
For this reason, you should not spare running a proper needs assessment before jumping into the exciting work of designing a course agenda. Do you have any questions about designing train the trainer courses? Anything specific about this 7-day course template? I was of late ran over your website and have been perusing along. I thought I would leave my first remark. If you do go for it, please let me know how you do.
You'll be not only a better trainer but also a more valuable one by virtue of holding a credential accepted across a variety of industries. Good luck. Editor's Picks. The best programming languages to learn in Check for Log4j vulnerabilities with this simple-to-use script. TasksBoard is the kanban interface for Google Tasks you've been waiting for.
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