PraxisUnico is keen to expand the number of experienced practitioners who develop and deliver our world-class training and earlier this year we put out a call at the annual conference for anyone interested to contact us.
We had a great response and in October 2015 the first group of 10 people attended two days of free intensive training in London. This was designed and delivered by Nessa Carey, PraxisUnico’s International Director, and judging from the amount of noise in the room and the feedback forms the course was a great success.
The training was highly interactive, with Nessa only using 6 PowerPoint slides over the course of the 2 days. One of the trainees classified it as “meta-training” which was an excellent description as the course was delivered using a wide variety of the techniques that were themselves methods we wanted to promote. The training was very practical in nature, but with nuggets of theory in there to give a conceptual backbone. Nothing very complicated really – just a recognition that if something bores you it will probably bore other people too, and constant reiteration of the mantra “if they’re not learning, we’re not training”.
Chocolate made its way into more of the exercises than you might expect and even without confectionary bribes the trainees threw themselves into exercises that included setting learning outcomes around surviving the zombie apocalypse. And when it came to Post-It Notes, rarely have so many been used by so few.
The exercise that made the greatest impact for the trainees was running a five minute training session on both days, followed on each occasion by self and peer feedback. Repeating the exercise the second day gave the trainees the chance to put some of the techniques they had learnt into practise and everyone embraced the chance to try something new. It’s the peer feedback that makes this exercise work so well, especially as the trainees came from a wide range of different organisations and from a variety of sectors and specialisms.
We will be starting to integrate some of the trainees into the delivery teams for various PraxisUnico courses over the coming year. If they haven’t attended a PraxisUnico course in the last few years we are offering them the chance to be an observer on a course in which they are interested. Once they are comfortable with delivering material they will have the support of the Course Directors and other trainers to help them along.
We will be running the training course for potential new trainers again in 2016, so if you have three or more years of experience working in a KEC role and are interested in becoming a trainer for PraxisUnico, please contact nessa.carey@praxisunico.org.uk or lisa.newman@praxisunico.org.uk.