At the recent BFLG South 'clinic', I shared an issue which was tricky, not so much because of the topic, but because of the timescale: I had an imminent deadline to meet and had already done a lot of the work I was seeking advice on! So, many thanks to those who joined me, for putting up with those constraints.
I needed help to create (or really finish creating) a "Trainer Pack" for a course.
This course was one I'd conceived 'from the ground up', under tight time pressure, but without any opportunity to deliver it myself under 'trial' circumstances.
Amongst the valuable input I received were:
( A ) wise questions I should have asked the client long ago
(e.g. "what level of experience do the trainers who'll give the course have?" which would have helped me know to what extent I needed to give them a blow by blow explanation of learning points, how to run the exercises etc).
( B ) wise shortcuts to use when documenting training
(e.g. using codes to indicate at a glance the nature of the thing being described at any point in the document - e.g. EDIP, where putting E alongside your notes would stand for Explanation; D would indicate Demonstration; I would suggest learners should be Imitating the trainer's demo; and P would mean the learners should be Practising their own scenarios.)
( C ) wise advice for how to produce guidance at different levels of complexity - but all covering the same learning session
(e.g. a mindmap as a one sheet overview; a 'session story' (a high level narrative painting the broadbrush flow of the training session); bullet-point notes to cover the key elements of the training in more detail; and if required, more detailed accounts of the mechanics of the training, even down to timings, resources needed, photos of flipcharts, how to handle likely problems etc - even an audio guide?)
I found the input very helpful indeed. In the end, I decided the best route forward was to continue my current work, but attempt to 'reign it in' as much as possible in terms of detail/complexity (so as not to be working through the night on it, or anything silly like that!!)
So I ended up with a set of materials (A4 handouts, paper puzzles, PowerPoint file, physical props etc) plus a "one-size-fits-all" Trainer Pack document, in a TABULAR structure (see attached image) where narrow columns on the left and right showed:
- timings
- section headings,
- nature of the activity being described and
- resources needed
...and the main column in the middle had narrative, explanations, instructions to the trainer, war-stories for the trainer to use or not as they see fit, etc.
I presented this to my client (actually only about 90% finished) on the deadline day.
And guess what? Their own plans for implementing it had slowed down somewhat, so an incomplete first draft was perfectly appropriate at this stage (funny how often the goalposts change to suit the workload you've actually managed to produce - I'm sure there's a law of nature that covers that - subject for another BFLG thread perhaps?!)
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