The Effective Trainer - making dreams come true

You gotta have a dream

There is an old Arabic saying that if you do not know where you are going then any road will take your there. A good trainer is clear in her mind about what needs to be done and she knows that she will be doing the right thing.

This means that she will have thought about her aims and objectives and will have written them down. Sometimes these will have been given to her (for example if she is leading people towards an SVQ qualification) and sometime she will have to decide for herself what they are. Even when they are given, however, there is always the possibility of fine tuning them and sharing them with the learners so that there can be agreement on exactly what a particular course is trying to achieve.

Note that she will have three different types of objectives:

Head	Hand	Heart
Thinking	Doing	Feeling
Knowledge	Skills	Attitudes

How you gonna make the dream come true?

Being clear about aims and objectives means being clear about her dream. The next task is to figure out how to make the dream come true. She is doing the right thing but is she going to do it right?

Muddling through by the seat of your pants might achieve the results sometimes but it is not a professional way of working. Would you trust a plumber or a brain surgeon that pottered about unsystematically?

Action planning for a trainer means being systematic about the content, the methods and the monitoring and assessment techniques that will be used to achieve the aims and objectives.

There are three things to think about regarding content:

Scope	How broad and how deep are you going to go during this course - is it for pre-school or for university? Who are the learners and what is their level of experience of the topic?
Sequence	Where to begin and where to go to next?
Pace	How fast will you move through the content?

There are thousands of possible methods but it is useful to think of them as falling into two broad types:

Teacher centred	Learner centred
Didactic	Participatory
Passive student	Active student
eg the Lecture	eg project work

When assessment is used to 'grade' students it is a political tool. When assessment is used to give feedback to the student (or the tutor) on the extent to which the objectives are being achieved so that she can improve her performance - then it is a training tool. All good trainers ensure that learners get a lot of feedback during the course of their learning - many small but detailed corrections along the way are more useful than one big and generalised judgement at the end!

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