Train The Trainer – Tip #5

by Amy Parrish

In video number five of the Train The Trainer series, Amy talks about how she keeps her participants engaged 80% of the time. Watch below and be sure to check out the rest of our series for more ways to create a meaningful and dynamic training environment.

Transcript:

Hi, I am Amy with Iluma Learning. One of our big flagship programs here at Iluma Learning is our Train the Trainer certification. And I have a lot of love for trainers because we have a hard job. We have to find a way to make what we want to get across and what we want adults to learn. We’ve got to get them open, we’ve gotta get them willing to suspend what they already know to add something new to it. So there’s a real art to being a great trainer. So we love to put trainers through the paces and teach them a lot of our tools that help them really improve.

And so another tip that we have as part of our blog series on Train the Trainer is make sure the participants are actively talking, doing, and problem solving 80% of the time. That’s right, 80% we are wanting them to be engaged. Now does that mean you’re only teaching 20% of the time? Nope. You are teaching 100% of the time, but you are getting them to engage. So I am presenting some information and then I am asking a question, getting them to go to a lab, I am getting them to turn to the person next to them and tell them what they understand, what they don’t understand. I’m asking them to consider, Hey, how does this information apply when you’re back at work? I’m doing all kinds of things that are getting them to engage with the material. That is a really important piece.

So 80% of the time, I am getting them to think, talk, consider, problem, solve, get up, go do something. We are just trying to get them to stay engaged the whole time. 80%. It’s hard when you get in that room and you’ve got a lot of slides to get through. And so the big question then becomes, is there a way for me to share this information with my class that would give them an understanding, a context of all these slides without going slide by slide by slide to give them the information. So making it dynamic means they’ve got to be just shifting all the time, all the time. So 80% of the time they are talking about it, asking a question, considering a problem that they’re trying to solve. Trying to just really focus in on the material doesn’t mean you talk just 20%, but if you work with that toward your goal, you will have a very, very dynamic training experience.