Why Train the Trainer?

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Every trainer needs two different sets of skills and knowledge.

First, they must know what subject they’re teaching (content-related expertise). Secondly, they must know how to convey this information to the student (instruction expertise). However, in practice, that’s not always the case.

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A practical Train the Trainer example:
 

When a teacher is hired to train adult students, he needs both skills.
The problem is that the teacher masters the subject matter and has the required experience and diploma but hasn’t been trained how best to convey the theory.

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The school assumes that teachers, after having been exposed to so many learning experiences, have learned how people learn by looking at other instructors who teach. But usually, these skills are taught in the traditional lecture style, which isn’t interactive and effective for various learning styles.

Several examples of creating training-the-trainer programmes include:

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• It makes trainers authoritative. If you want students to pay attention, be engaged and retain the information that’s presented to them, it’s important they feel it’s coming from an authority.

• Trainers will be better prepared to have interactive discussion with the group. This allows the trainer to train leaders to deal with their audience by having everyone process and think at a deeper level.

• The trainers will have a better understanding of how to appeal to a diverse learning audience and are truly able to ‘retain’ content. This could be important, not only for actually teaching training programmes, but also when the participants are part of developing the content.

Getting Started