Train The Trainer – Tip #6

We can teach anybody how to teach anything! Learn how by watching our series on Train The Trainer, a flagship program here at Iluma Learning. Today’s training tip is on “bridging”, let’s dive in!

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Amy with Iluma Learning, and we’re back as we talk about Train the Trainer and how we certify subject matter experts to help them really be able to teach others what they have an expertise in. So we have covered lots of different things throughout this series. Just talking about kind of some of the best tips that we have to help our trainers really be dynamic, interesting, and create a class that is sticky. We want sticky classes, meaning we want that information to stick. Whatever you learned, I want you to be able to walk out of my classroom and be able to apply it at work. So we work with all kinds of people, work with a lot of technical people, but we also work with a lot of managers who are trying to teach people how to be leaders. Trying to teach how to communicate, and trying to teach how to operate or repair a machine. We can teach anybody how to teach anything!

So as we continue our series, one of the cool tips that I use a lot is called Bridging. And Bridging is where we, anytime we have taken a break, we have stopped for lunch, we have done an activity and we’re coming back to a large group. We have been looking at something for a while. Now we’re ready to switch topics. We have gone for the evening and we come back back the next morning. We want our participants to have a seamless experience of the information.

So just let’s say we were watching Oprah back when she was, had a lot of, you know, interviews and there were commercial breaks. When she would come back from the break, she would go, Hey, before the break we were talking to this person about this. So now, and then they move back into the topic. So it’s a way of getting you to refocus back on the material, what’s happening at break during our trainings, people are calling back to the office. The school’s calling about their kid being sick, you know, they’ve got something they’re doing that evening and they’ve got that on their mind, they try to run back and check an email. Their head is somewhere else when they come back into that classroom. So getting them to refocus by just saying, Hey, we left off here yesterday. We were talking about this, and we covered steps one, two, and three. Now we’re gonna start with step four, and maybe I review what steps one, two, and three were so that they kind of get back into the mode of, oh yeah, I’m here to learn this. Let me refocus. It’s a great tool. And if you can start to just think about, I’m just always bridging one topic to the other, or one break to the next part of that topic. So I’m always helping remind the student where they have been and where we’re going. So I’m bridging over all the time so that there is fewer distractions and they can jump back into the material faster. It’s a great tool and it’s what separates a good trainer from a great one. I hope you’ll try it.