Delivering training with passion and engagement: Extraordinary trainers quickly engage their adult learners, build connections, and earn trust. Their passion is contagious. How can you make sure you are delivering your training with the same passion and engagement?
Teachers who are learning look for information that can easily and quickly translate into their grade level and content areas. Research tells us that adults prefer to focus on relevant problems and solutions. Are you able to design your sessions with these essential qualities in mind? Doing so will help you build rapport and trust, and enhance your interpersonal training skills. How can I help the teachers understand Advanced Google Search Tools when they research information about current events?” I like to use the news to build the case for training teachers to use Google Search strategies in their classroom. I also like to give them the tools to use when they are searching for information in front of their students. By adding the phrase “for kids” to the end of a search query, they are likely to come up with more appropriate content. Also, filtering the search by time limits the search further. Training the teachers to be in charge of their search increases the likelihood that they’ll model it for their students, and then the students can search more effectively, too.
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- Build Relationships and Trust: Creating a positive trainer–teacher relationship by having ongoing conversations with teachers and establishing trust by remaining confidential. It’s important to be authentic when talking to teachers and remain empathetic to their needs.
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- Share Success Stories of Teachers: Use Gmail, Blogger, or Google+ to create a weekly email or Blogger post that not only shares new resources or reminders but one that highlights a teacher’s success story. Doing so can help resistant teachers see the impact of your training and how to benefit from attending your workshops. Share stories of teachers implementing tools from your training sessions in their classrooms.
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- Create and Curate Helpful Videos: Build helpful video resources and upload them to YouTube. You can create video tutorials with Camtasia or Screencastify. (License for Camtasia when you become a Google for Education Certified Trainer). You can also curate existing YouTube content by organizing them into playlists. Share your playlists with teachers through email, during training sessions, or while working with teachers one-on-one.
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- Make the Conversations about Students: Share the successes students have encountered with digital tools. You can use Google Forms to gather student feedback. You can also use Google Sheets to organize the data you collected.
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- Observe the Audience: move around the room and observe the audience. You can learn quite a bit by engaging teachers with conversations during your training session. It’s okay to listen to the audience and change your plan for the session based on their reactions.
- Design Training With Teachers: Living reluctant or resistant teachers in conversations before the training sessions, you not only build a better trainer–teacher relationship, but you also help those teachers feel like they are part of the planning process. What’s more, when you bring teacher voice and choice into the planning, you are helping to build teacher engagement.
DELIVERING TRAINING WITH PASSION AND ENGAGEMENT:
