May I take this (timely!) opportunity to thank you for the jigsaw lesson, I re-read it last week and it helped enormously with some training I was planning – good stuff.

@Dick/All
Sorry for the blog hijack – carry on

In my programming classes, I just do what I usually do when developing, and invariably I screw something up and get an error message. Then I go through debugging, find what’s wrong, and fix it.

These trips into the tools and capabilities of the IDE are very informative, and I’ve had people in the class comment on how smoothly I’d integrated these simulated errors as a learning tool. Little do they know.

I may be a masochist, but I tell stories during training of my… screw ups. Tales from the trenches as mentioned above.

It’s not pure masochism, I actually believe that reviewing errors – even hearing about other people’s – is very instructive. They provide a backdrop to the topic (how were we attempting to use this technique?) and caution about when NOT to use a certain technique.

They also provide a great deal of humor during training (at the teacher’s expense… maybe that is just masochism.)

It needs to be balanced with the things you do right, however, if you do expect that some of the students will engage you at their company to design mission critical applications.

Sales Autopsy contains some brutally painful mistakes made by salespeople and how to avoid them (http://www.salesautopsy.com see the John Madden video… ouch). Is there an equivalent for developers and trainers? I’ll write a couple chapters…

Unfortunately, people (or their managers) regard a training course as a substitute for any more extended period of learning – (some) delegates turn up wanting a ‘blood transfusion’ of knowledge, without any real effort on their part. Unsurprisingly, they can be disappointed.

That all sounded a bit negative… I think there are potential solutions, but probably only for in-house courses.

/Roy

Stay away from Powerpoint bullet point slides if possible – use Powerpoint to show pictures that compliment what you are saying – they’ve come to see you – not Powerpoint slides (well we hope they’ve come to see you)

When creating training sessions I prefer to run through “real world” examples. You need to through in difficulties and explain how to get around them.

Also really encourage questions from the audience – this is harder with larger groups. Many questions are viral and spread easily to other things that are really uueful for the audience. Don’t be afraid to stray widely from the course outline if the audience wants to go there.

With tips and trick sessions the firehose / shotgun approach is worthwhile because people use Excel so differently.

Unfortunately, I don’t think enthusiasm can be manufactured – you have either got a real interest in it, and can see the importance of it, or you don’t.

When I do training I try and start with a bang – something that will make the audience think ‘I want to know this’. then a 2 min overview then get them doing an activity. People like tales from the trenches.

people who go on training courses aren’t like many of us here who from the sounds of it prefer self directed learning. If I go on a course I like to see a million things then have good enough reference stuff to fill in the gaps and get more comfortable in my own time. Others might like to get a good grip on just one or two items.

I personally learn much better from a person than from a book. Don’t get me wrong, I learn a lot from books, but I learn BETTER from a person. You can’t ask a question of a book.

In terms of learning, I say walk me through an example, then give me a similar (though not identical!) exercise to work out on my own using the same principles. It’s got to be different enough to be challenging, but not a problem where I need to use knowledge I do not have, if you know what I mean.

I think stand-up desks is not a good idea. It would be okay to alternate between stand-up desks and sitting, but standing at a desk all day would really get old if I’m not able to move around.

Give examples of where you’ve used a technique – tell a story! Tell a joke. Confess where you’ve blundered. We can learn by others mistakes as well as their successes!

One other issue. If you use PowerPoint slides and do not actually read them, give your audience time to read them themselves. If the audience cannot read the entire contents of the slide, then those contents are useless and unnecessary and should not be there in the first place.

1. Some people learn differently than others, but we all fall into a few simple categories. Some people can learn in whatever format is presented to them, but others can only learn in that one particular format that suits them. It is the responsibility of the instructor to modify their presentation to suit all the students. But that’s the rub… when you change for one, you alienate others. It would be ideal if you had several classes that covered the same material, but was presented in various formats (and could segregate your students into the proper class for them). I wish we lived in an ideal world, but only you can determine that balance in your class (and it will be different for each group of students, so you will have to adjust on the fly).

2. Do your homework. I know you know the subject. But for each hour of presentation, you need to spend a minimum of five hours of preparation. The guy reading the power point slides did NOT do his homework. You should rehearse what you are going to say, how you are going to say it, and how you are going to use your training aids. Condense this down to bullets that you can glance at yet not stand there “reading”.

3. I could go on with dozens of points… but I’ll leave you with what, in my opinion, is the most critical one. TEACH BY QUESTIONS. Not just a light sprinkling… but a heavy downpour. And not rhetorical ones either. Ask a question to the audience (expect the blank stares), then walk over to the 2nd slowest student and say “so, John Doe, what do you think?”. Use their response (right or wrong) to build your next question on, and call on the person in the front playing solitaire. Your students will never know when they will be called upon (and you make sure that the ALL get called on several times), so they all have to pay attention. Since it didn’t matter if they got it right or wrong, they don’t feel picked on. In a one hour topic, I usually ask over 100 questions (and yes, I know that you can’t do this in a room of 500 people… but that’s not a lesson, that’s a lecture… and it’s also not teaching).

Ok, I’m off my soapbox now. Best of luck to you!