Silicon Beach Training Blog » Presentation

VIDEO: Train the Trainer – Planning a Training Session

Andy Trainer — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:22:36 +0000

Train the Trainer Training

Here at Silicon Beach Training we’re immensely proud of the quality of training that we provide – and we love teaching other people how to deliver great training sessions too, via our Train the Trainer course.

Knowing your subject matter is only part of being able to deliver great training. Understanding how adults learn, engaging with them effectively, and planning your training session properly are all essential to ensuring that attendees understand and retain what you teach them.

In this video, filmed on one of our Train the Trainer courses – our trainer Mary guides delegates through the stages of planning and designing an effective training session.

We’ve summarised the video below with some great tips on how to plan your own session.

These are edited highlights of this section of our workshop. We cover a lot more besides on out 2-day train the trainer course here in Brighton, Sussex – so why not come along and hone your training technique?

By Silicon Beach Training on Vimeo.

Train the Trainer: Planning a 10 Minute Training Session – Top Tips

When you plan a training session, its not just about what subjects you’re going to cover when. A well planned training session will provide the following elements for each stage:

Content
Questioning Techniques
Activities

During our Train the Trainer course each delegate is asked to deliver and refine their own short training session. This is broadly broken down as follows:

Introduction

The introduction of the training session is about acquisition. You introduce the topic, introduce yourself, and most importantly introduce the delegates.

Ask delegates to introduce themselves before you introduce yourself - give them your name, but don’t start boring them with your own background and experience until they’ve had a chance to speak. Asking the delegates to introduce themselves first puts the focus on the learners, gets their vocal cords going and breaks the ice. It’ll also help you to understand their experience so that you can adapt your training session as needed to the learners’ needs.

During the introduction, find out as a minimum:

Delegates’ Names
Their Jobs
Their Existing Experience

Use round robin and overall questioning to do this (we cover a range of questioning techniques in detail on the course!)

Timetable

Now introduce the timetable - its very important that delegates understand from the start of the course what’s on offer, as they can then make clear in their minds from the beginning how the training will relate to them and how they will use it. At this stage learners will engage with the contract of the learning. If you don’t bother to establish the agenda and dive straight in to the content – the focus is all on you as the trainer.

Ask delegates if they are happy with the timetable. Is it what they were expecting, and is there anything missing that they would like to cover in addition?

Find out the delegates’ aims and write them up on a flip chart or wall for reference throughout the course.

If there are practical exercises within the course that delegates will need to prepare for (and if it’s going to be an effective course there should be!) they need to know when these will occur so that they don’y get taken by surprise later on.

Learning Section

You can now move on to covering the actual content of the training…

Objectives

Set out the objectives for each session. It’s equally important to find out delegates’ existing experience of that topic before you cover it – as some of the attendees may have knowledge that is beneficial to the group in addition to what you were going to deliver (or may have approached things in a slightly different way). Not all of the learning that takes place on a course comes from the trainer – the delegates can learn a lot from each others experience too!

Again – you can use the overall and round robin questioning techniques to get this information from the delegates.

Starting with an overall question to the whole group will help you to identify and activists in the group – those people who can’t wait to share their experiences. However then going round the group with round robin questions will ensure that everyone’s voice get’s heard.

Learning

Having set the objectives, you can now move on to the actual learning.

Include group work and exercises which will engage the activists and pragmatists in the group. At the same time, the theorists and reflectors in your group will still have their needs met, as you have established a good structure, timetable and objectives in your introduction.

Overall and return questioning techniques work well in the learning section

Summary / Review / Application

It’s very important to review content at the end of each session. More importantly, it should be the delegates who summarise this – not you – so that you can be sure that they the group has understood what they have learned.

This also allows an opportunity for delegates to reflect on what they have learned and the application of that in the real world, rather than just assimilating knowledge.

This is the only point where you should use the pick one questioning technique, as it depends on them having obtained knowledge during the learning section.

Personal Objectives

At the very end of your training session, you need to refer back to the original learners’ aims that you established during the introduction section. If you have planned and delivered your training session effectively, you should never find that there are any delegates who’s objectives have not been met.

By using well planned activities and questioning techniques throughout your course, you will ensure that delegates of all learning styles, reflectors, theorists, activists and pragmatists, have their learning objectives met and are able to apply what they have learned to their own requirements.

Learn More

To learn more about how to plan and deliver effective training – including activities, questioning techniques and giving feedback – attend our 2-day Train the Trainer course here in Brighton.

Call us on 01273 622272 or e-mail info@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk for more information and bookings.

Twitter Battering of Keynote

Heather Buckley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:23:08 +0000

The bad presentation given at the HighEdWeb Open and Connected Conference last week certainly made the headlines. My immediate response to the issue was ‘that’s a great lesson in how important it is to Know your Audience’. The feedback, traffic and mentions Twitter-heckled Key Note Speaker – Know your Audience! has attracted made me realise that from a Social Media perspective there are many more lessons to be learned. Those interested in building up their online presence using Social Media may be interested in our one day Social Networking Training course, or even our SEO Training course.

Here are some of the opinions expressed in the aftermath of the event.

Some people are pointing out that many of those writing about this event were not even there (including me – I’m in Brighton in the UK)
Some of those twittering real-time were not even in the room.
The conference as a whole was well received and that only an hour of the whole event hit the headlines, which is a shame for the organisers.
The main people who started the negative twittering were only a handful.
It has all been blown out of proportion by us bloggers.

Well yes, yes , yes, yes, yes and yes. But isn’t that what makes it all so interesting from a Social Media perspective?

The story is so interesting it got picked up immediately by those interested in Social Media
The extensive use of twitter allowed the story to be disseminated real-time and proved that if those who are well connected send out a message to others equally well connected it soon accelerates and is received by an incredible range at incredible speed.
The blog post I wrote about it has been linked to and visited more in the shortest amount of time than any other page I have written.
If your content is interesting, topical and current enough then the bigger influencers will use it and your reach will extend very fast.

One of the comments “conspiracy theory about the keynote: it’s a test of the power of the back channel; social experiment” might not be so far form the truth even if not intentional.

I have heard that someone twittered the poor guys number and he has bee receiving texts and calls about how bad he was – that is cruel and it is sad. Did he deserve it – I don’t think so, should he have been more prepared – definatetely.

Silicon Beach Training offer Presentation Training, and an Advanced Presentation Skills Course. We also have a Presentation Skills Free Resources section.

Twitter-heckled Key Note Speaker – Know your Audience!

Heather Buckley — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:19:06 +0000

Two days ago a Keynote speaker at the Social Media Conference “HighEdWeb 2009: Open. Connected” Showed how dangerous it can be to give a presentation without knowing your audience. Apparently he is not on Twitter and was talking about the effectiveness of Snail Mail Campaigns, and using not very good and outdated PowerPoint Slides. The organisation hosting the event seem social media savvy enough and encouraged attendees to use the tag #heweb09 to follow the back channel discussion.

(See our range of Social Media Training courses to learn more – including a new leading edge SEO training course)

Oh dear – The Social Media conversant audience soon started to tweet about the speakers outdated comments . The audience being well connected caused an avalanche effect as tweets and re-tweets flooded twitter escalating it to the trending topic of the day!

Tweets this presenter could learn from :

Gold font on gray background w/ 1990 drop shadow makes babies cry. Should we stage intervention
“Videos are not automatically good”
hella drop shadow
Someone turn up the contrast
Ugly slide and I can’t hear u
too much background music
OH: it’s always relevant when you use popular hip hop songs from 5 years ago
We’ve had two keynotes, neither of whom build websites…
KAZAA OMG. how old is this video? Kazaa has been dead for years
im currently reminded of towelie from south park, I have no idea whats going on right now
blah blah blah out of business blah blah blah here watch a video
Can anyone hear this guy? Or read his slides?
conspiracy theory about the keynote: it’s a test of the power of the back channel; social experiment
We’ve moved to 10 years ago now…
I think the sound guy has fallen asleep
talking quite, music loud, are they trying to get to go have a quick nap before the 1:30 presos??
Anyone else confused by that video?
I think I’m about to have a seizure
ok. slides with paragraphs of information make me turn around, and tweet about how such things are bad
Watching keynote. Clearly I’m not the only one that sucks at Powerpoint. I was smart enough to not use it though.
Why is this guy here?
18things flashing and beeping. That’s why we need movement on the homepage . Right
Someone needs a class on PowerPoint… Sound levels in videos … And being relevant to your audience.
You know a presentation is relevant when it mentions Xanga.
watching people try to figure out how they can get out, starting to see the OMG I AM TRAPPED looks on faces
Did we go back in time 4 years? Knew all this already. Something new please!!
Worst designed powerpoint ever. Ever.
Oh he wants frequent and immediate feedback. Anyone?
ha ha this reminds me that myspace is the trailer park of social media. ha ha

Presenters beware – twittering will be around for some time, if you have a large audience be sure you know them well and give them what they want. Even if you know all this and are a great presenter following your audience reaction on twitter can only be a good thing, feedback is a good thing and now it is happening real time.

Those interested in building up their online presence using Social Media may be interested in our one day Social Media Training course. Silicon Beach Training offer Presentation Training, and an Advanced Presentation Skills Course. We also have a Presentation Skills Free Resources section.