Time for some more?

After last week's early finish blip, tonight's session went well. I had a good range of activities and the learners really got a lot out of the visualisation exercise. I'd learnt this on a course I attended years ago whilst working for another company. Put simply, you are asked to close your eyes and picture someone who's excellent at doing something - in this case delivering training. The facilitation (me) then gives you a range of prompts to get you to reflect on certain aspects of their behaviour, such as their body language, how they interact with the delegates and the words they use to deliver messages. When the learners open their eyes, they need to record quickly their observations, share these in small groups and try to pick out common themes.

This works well because the learners are basing their thoughts on real people rather than the usual 'write down what you think'. It also encourages role model behaviour and for learners to construct how they want to use this information to inform their personal training style.

This evening I also tried to control the learning environment more. I arrived early and moved the tables so they were in 3 large groups - to facilitate the exercises. I then had 3 tutorials to do and can you guess what had happened when I went back into the room? Yes, the learners had moved the table back to the usual position. My learning point is to tell them or, if no one if there to tell, to leave a note. They only had to move them back again.

Next week, observation number two...