Shift Your Training Model

21Mar10

I just attended a one day training session and experienced the following:

The trainer taught straight from PowerPoint bullets and read the text (well he had most of it memorized) from the handouts.
The trainer didn’t like it when someone raised their hand or interrupted him to ask a question.
Wrote questions on the whiteboard and never addressed them.
Was rushed to cover the content in the allotted time for the session.

Does this all sound all too familiar? Have you ever stopped to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if I am this guy when I do my training? I mean really think about it. Ask yourself who the training is for. Is it for me, the trainer- after all this is my job we are talking about- or is it about the students and what they are learning? Take another look at what you do for training. Do your activities focus on you or your students?

Have we been focusing on ourselves for so long that we have lost the fact that we are here for the students not for us? We are here to provide the students with knowledge and to enable them to reason, not to spew out facts and page after page of information. We need to redirect or energies and to change our focus from at training-centric training model to a learner-centric training model.