The Magic of Great Training

Hello, adult education aficionados! I’m Guila (pronounced “ghee-lah”) Muir. I’m an avid adult educator, having studied this art for many years. For the last 17 years, I have run my business, Muir and Associates. We primarily train professionals from all walks of life to design and deliver effective training sessions and presentations.

I find this work highly creative and enjoyable. I provide SMEs a highly-honed, rapid instructional design process that they can use to develop sessions in their areas of expertise. I love research, so attempt to inject meaningful findings into my offerings in very practical ways.

I live in Seattle, WA, and do a lot of (cold) open water swimming. I was excited to discover the Training Debate blog and am happy to play a part in it!

Please visit me at http://www.guilamuir.com. I’ve got plenty of helpful articles at http://www.guilamuir.com/train-the-trainer-articles/, and add a new one each month.

Here’s a short article that supports what many of you do.

What Separates Great Trainers From the Merely “OK?”

Many train­ing par­tic­i­pants would respond, “Great train­ers make the learn­ing easy and fun.” If probed fur­ther, they might men­tion the use of engag­ing train­ing activ­i­ties, or the trainer’s per­sonal style.

But most won’t be able to iden­tify an impor­tant action that dif­fer­en­ti­ates expert train­ers. This action is sub­tle and pow­er­ful. It helps lubri­cate the ses­sion and increases learner reten­tion. Though mostly invis­i­ble to the untrained eye, it truly sep­a­rates the “Greats” from the “OK’s.”

What is this seem­ingly magic char­ac­ter­is­tic of great train­ing? It’s the use of tran­si­tions.

What are Transitions?

Tran­si­tions are ver­bal check­points. They con­nect dis­parate pieces of mate­r­ial and move the ses­sion for­ward. In using tran­si­tions, the trainer oper­ates much like the pilot of a plane: “We’ve just got­ten a good look at the Col­orado River. Next, we’ll be fly­ing over Hoover Dam.”

This ver­bal fram­ing helps the par­tic­i­pants’ brains orga­nize all the new con­tent they’re receiv­ing. It also read­ies them to process new input.

What do Tran­si­tions Look Like?

Tran­si­tions typ­i­cally have two parts, the sum­mary and the tran­si­tion statement.

• Sum­maries reit­er­ate, check for, or test key points.
• Tran­si­tions move the train­ing from one stage to the next.

Here are three exam­ples of effec­tive transitions.

A. “We’ve just intro­duced (reviewed, talked about, etc.) ___________.
“Now, let’s move on to_____________.”

B. “We’ve just reviewed ___________. What are the _______, ___________, _____________?”
“Next, we’ll take a look at ____________.”

C. “Each of you has demon­strated that you can _____________. Now, you will have the oppor­tu­nity to ________________.”

By build­ing in tran­si­tions like these, the trainer makes the whole ses­sion flow bet­ter. There is a built-in silk­i­ness, flu­id­ity, and logic between chunks of con­tent. And best of all, the trainer has the oppor­tu­nity to test for par­tic­i­pants’ under­stand­ing before mov­ing to the next issue.

Try using a few well-thought-out tran­si­tions between mod­ules in your next train­ing ses­sion. You’ll be amazed at how much more smoothly the class goes, and how much more the par­tic­i­pants retain.

© 2009 Guila Muir. All rights reserved. You may make copies of this arti­cle and dis­trib­ute in any media so long as you change noth­ing, credit the author, and include this copy­right notice and web address.