Have you ever attended a training event at work that began with the trainer delivering a set of ground rules for the class? If the answer is yes, the rules probably sounded like this. Good morning everyone! Before we get started, let me go over a few ground rules for today’s class. First, and most...
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Congratulations to Dale Ludwig, Turpin Communication’s Founder and President, for winning the Training Industry Readership Award at the Training Industry Conference & Expo in Raleigh, NC on May 10, 2016! The award is for his much-read article, “Let’s Get Serious about Live, Instructor-Led Training,” which was published in the fall 2015 edition of Training Industry...
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Wow! An article written by Dale Ludwig, Turpin Communication’s President and Founder, has been listed in Training Industry’s Top 10 Articles of 2015! The Top 10 list highlights the most-read articles of the year at Training Industry, one of the premier resources in corporate learning & development. According to their website, “By making this list,...
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I had a conversation over the backyard fence with one of my neighbors a couple of days ago. She was home for the weekend after her first two weeks of college. The conversation focused on the campus, her new roommate, and her classes. As far as the classes are concerned, she said that most of...
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Some time ago, I was delivering a workshop for a group of soon-to-be trainers. Each of them was a subject matter expert (SME), and they were preparing to deliver training to groups of people within their organization. On the first day of the class, we were focused on helping the SMEs strengthen the skills required...
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I often make the comment in workshops—especially when the class is for internal trainers or SMEs preparing to lead their own workshops—that the best teacher-training I ever received occurred at my first job, the three years I worked as a high school English teacher. No group of learners of any age or occupation is more...
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Over the weekend, I was reminded yet again of how poorly people understand the art of facilitating group discussions. Backstory I participated in a meeting made up of leaders of various professional organizations in Chicago. Our goal was to identify ways for us to work better together. I was seated at a table of four,...
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This is a follow-up to the blog I wrote a few months ago, They Won’t Speak if You Don’t Listen. In that post, I mentioned that facilitators have two fundamental goals. They need to (1) encourage participation in the conversation and (2) control the discussion once it begins. As I said, facilitators often spend too much...
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One of the biggest problems facilitators have is very basic: failure to stay in the moment to listen and respond to what people have to say. When we work with facilitators in our workshops, we always say that there are two primary goals in every discussion. (1) Facilitators need to encourage the conversation. They need...
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When we’re working with trainers on their facilitation skills, one of the common issues we see is the trainer’s attempt to get to the “right” answer as quickly as possible. No matter how subtle or complex the question might be, many trainers are frantic to get past A so they can get on to B. We’re...
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