What makes a good training?

Having spent Thursday acclimatising to the 30 degree heat and getting over our jet lag, Friday was time to get down to work. This weekend we will be running a total of 10 hours of training for existing Aruban leaders, so ahead of our meeting with the Board in the evening we took time during the day to plan out what activities we would include in the sessions.

 

We have been given a steer from last year’s team and the evaluation at the end of their project that leaders want us to cover guiding topics and some generic skills. With two days of training (we think with the same group at each) we split these into a Saturday session about guiding principles and WAGGGS, and followed this with Sunday’s session exploring communication and leadership skills.

It’s important to maintain energy and focus with such a long training session, so there’s many things you need to think about in terms of order and variety of activities. Here’s our top tips for training session planning:

1. Include ice-breakers. Not everyone will know each other before the session, so an ice-breaker is a great way to get people talking.
2. And make sure you introduce yourself as the trainers.
3. Mix it up with an energiser at least every hour or two – especially after a very serious or focused activity. Energisers are active games that encourage you to get up and move, sing, or start talking.
4. Plan more content that you need, but always be prepared that some activities will over run. Timings depend on the group so you need to be flexible in your approach and prepared for whatever may happen.
5. Include breaks. In a five hour training session everyone will need time for loo breaks, to get drinks and snacks or lunch. These might also be a chance for people to informally ask questions that they don’t want to ask in front of the whole group.
6. Be confident. We were selected for GOLD based on our potential to help develop another guiding organisation and have had a chance to practice our training skills during our briefings. Think about how fabulous the training will be and what all the participants will get out of it and avoid any worries about things going wrong.