Our train the trainer courses have been delivered the length and breadth of the UK, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
If you want to jump ahead in your training career, our train the trainer courses will spur your development.
One of the quickest and best ways to learn a skill is to do it yourself. Therefore, a training program must provide as many practical opportunities as possible. A lecture may cover much ground, but that ground will not be cultivated. We must work out and prioritize the key skills, processes, or procedures fundamental to mastering any particular task or role.
When helping one of my children learn a new piece of music, I know that pages full of new notes can seem daunting.
Most pieces of music are built on structures, sequences, and repetitions.
So often, by just learning the first four bars, we find we have already mastered a significant amount of the material. Typically, those four bars are repeated after the next four, and then they return towards the end of the piece, and maybe the section in the middle follows a similar pattern or rhythm. So having learned the first four bars of the piece, we have unlocked the key to much of what follows.
Equally, whether introducing new computer software, a new Health and Safety procedure, or teaching a new set of prepared responses for answering the most common telephone queries, by paying particular attention to the most reoccurring or fundamental actions, we can focus the students' attention on practising two or three actions or responses, and in the process create a solid foundation for branching out further.
Since there is insufficient time to cover everything to full satisfaction, it is always of greater benefit to the student to cover a few key things well, practice them and securely embed them rather than trying to cover too much in a superficial way.
So if 'doing' is the key to learning, then an even better way of embedding a new skill is not just allowing the students to practice those skills themselves but by having them go one stage further and teach them to someone else.
The idea is that firstly:
the trainer demonstrates to the student;
then the student tries it for themselves,
and then the student is asked to teach that new skill to another person.
What now happens is that a process that we may be able to handle in a semi-automatic, unconscious way simply by copying the trainer is driven to a deeper level where we have to take time and think about what we are doing to be able to explain it to another colleague.
Students worked for major spectacles and contact lenses retailer in one of our ILM Train the Trainer courses. As part of her practical demonstration, she showed us how they taught new employees to measure a customer for new glasses.
First, she demonstrated how to do it;
then we had to perform the actions ourselves;
and then she asked each of us to 'teach' another student those same actions. We discovered that what we thought we understood perfectly was not as clear as we had believed!
By trying to teach another student, we could highlight those parts of the process that we were not completely clear about.
'Each one - teach one' is a powerful teaching and learning tool.
It acknowledges that to grasp a process, it's good to have the hands-on experience yourself. However, the learning goes deeper if you are required to explain that process to another person.
