Thoughts...

Last Wednesday, the class mentioned a couple of things...

R said that she was nervous for Skills Practice being the only one who doesn't have experience in facilitation or training. She pointed out about educational background too. I felt rather sad. I feel her insecurities because I've been there too. I had wanted to soothe her by telling her I felt the same nervousness and butterflies during SP1 too regardless of how many years of training or facilitation experiences we have behind us - because it's only natural.

There is a vast difference in between conducting our usual training or facilitation at work vs. conducting in front of a 'panel' of 'judges' and what's more, in front of a rolling video-camera. Without a doubt.

Yet I struggled and thought - if I had told her how I felt, she may feel less confident and accepting her worries as relevant. If I choose not to share my feelings with her personally and, like the rest of the class, assure her that she's probably been worrying too much, that may lead her to accept this is something we have to go through and perhaps she could 'rough it out' and find her own comfort in facilitation soon?

This honestly sets me thinking, many of our trainees or learners at work felt the same way too especially those with language, education and age. Accordingly to situations and profiles, some we'll acknowledge their worries and play a listening ear or counselling role and for the rest, we'd use other tactics like convincing them they worried too much hoping that will give them that boost of confidence we feel they need.

Something to think about... could there be any other way to deal with this?

* * * * * * * * * *

While in discussion with P about challenges facing Contents. We came up with a few,

• There are many topics or performance criteria, how would we know which to focus more on so that we'll not be trapped as trainers with beautiful slides but not enough time to finish presenting them.
• For activities, how would we know if an activity is too easy or too difficult for the learners to carry out?

While discussing these challenges, I could quickly think of solutions, almost on-the-spot, and saw why the challenges were relevant for discussions.

I found the discussion important in the end! It made me think... and thus there is solution. This further confirms that having group discussions and sharing are important because they do, whether you believe or not, triggers memory retention and triggers ideas that may lead to a fruitful solution at the end of it all.

Looking back, I've always included activities and most of which are there to just keep learners active with some or sometimes, no connection to the learnings. Also, many times, unfortunately, I'd explain complex theory just to achieve our objectives and obligations of delivering them. No matter how casual or interactive I could be, the memory retention probably didn't last as long as we'd hope it would.

In future when I plan a lesson, I must be mindful

1. to include suitable activities that could lead learners to link them to more complex theory and better still, elicit them to come up with the link
2. to have less presentation just to fulfill requirements by the company or WSQ, and this could be done by doing point 1 + by simple hands-on activities
3. to check learners' progress by imposing active experiementation rather than a written assignment
   
4. to design or contextualize activities too, not just contents, to suit the profiles of the learners and retain their memory to achieve effective learning outcome
   

I'm beginning to see what Dr P said... we would be transformed!
Happy.