Learning
Training Exercises and Resources

Suppose you want to run an exercise in your course and want to divide your class into groups of 4. That is rather straight forward to do for small groups. Now, suppose you want to run another exercise and you want to mix up the groups. Is there a way to do this efficiently and systematically? We have developed a tool called Clock Buddies Random Group Generator to facilitate this process. The tool makes a series of personalised handouts (in the shape of discs) and students can use them to look up who they need to go with quickly.

In addition to the handouts given to the students, as a trainer or teacher, you can also use the same tool to generate all possible unique group combinations and have it as a reference. This helps you have an overall view of group configurations and when to switch from one combination to another. We call this the Group Layout View. To create them, you can use the “Generate Group Layouts” feature in the group generator tool. Let’s go through some examples to illustrate what the tool can do for you.

You are a subject expert. You are in the process of designing a face-to-face interactive course and wonder how to offer it to the market. A primary question you may ask yourself is how to decide the timing:

• How long should be the course?
• When should you run the course?
• How should you plan the breaks?
• When should you start or finish the course?

We know that answering such questions can depend on the domain, the target market and the local customs. In any case, getting to know what the training community thinks about such areas can be thought provoking, at least to know if your intuition about an answer is correct.

To find out what the training community thinks, we sent a survey and collected replies from our subscribers. In this article, we will present the data, followed by analysis of what this data suggests along with our own observations when running courses.

This is a fun exercise focusing on word play where the delegates need to converge on a common word based on previously suggested words. When convergence happens, it is immensely enjoyable. The pair feel as if they read each other’s minds. As such, this is a great exercise to bring people closer together. You can also use this exercise as an icebreaker though make sure you don’t run it for longer than 15 minutes.

Consider using this exercise for team building, enhancing vocabulary, creativity and memory. It is also a fantastic exercise for practicing a foreign language as delegates must constantly think of new words in a systematic way and since they get to work in teams, they can learn from each other too. You can also run this easily explained exercise for a large group as teams work in parallel without much impact on timing.

Have you ever attended a miserable and boring training course? Have you heard your colleague’s tale of boring training course? People love exceptionally good training courses and talk about them a lot, but if they experience a bad one, they feel just as equally compelled to let the world know.

If you are a trainer or in a position of teaching, you can appreciate delegates’ feedbacks. You can learn enormously from what works and what doesn’t. You can somewhat guess from the feedback what went wrong. However, while delivering a course, a particular course of action that sounds quite rational may actually be a bad idea.

Hence, exploring such feedback can be very educational. In this article, we have listed a series of feedbacks received from hypothetical learners who have attended a bunch of boring courses. We have designed these based on general patterns of feedback observed over the years. The aim is to see why these courses have been unsatisfying and what can be done to avoid such a fate.

In today's specialised world, many people are working hard to become an expert in something. Spending extensive time on any topic will turn a person into an expert in that subject just by sheer accumulation of knowledge. Sooner or later, some of such experts would find themselves in a position of teaching, training others to learn their techniques.

The problem is that most subject-matter experts would simply assume they know how to teach. Their main focus is on being a “content expert” as opposed to being a capable trainer. What keeps these trainers up at night is the worry of not having all the answers. What if they want to explain something and they suddenly forget what they wanted to say? What if they look like a fool? What if people are not convinced that they are indeed an expert on the topic?

What’s fascinating, and rather sad, is that few worry about appearing as a poor trainer or not knowing how to teach. It is a curious thing to know where this confidence in teaching ability comes from.

Being a good trainer requires a set of skills. Like any other skill, you need to practice in order to get better at this skill. This is quite different from being good at the topic you are teaching. Unfortunately, many think that practice means conducting course after course and hopefully getting it right eventually. Sure enough, you may get a little bit better, but you won’t significantly improve your teaching skills unless you engage in what is known as “deliberate practice”. This term was popularised by the world-famous researcher on expertise, Anders Ericsson.

In the past couple of decades, numerous researchers have contributed to the concept of deliberate practice and the findings are quite interesting and educational, helping us to learn effectively and become an expert in anything.

A great book published in this area is called, “Talent is Overrated: What really separates world-class performers from everybody else” by Geoff Colvin. It has become a classic book in the field along with, “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.

Colvin proposes three distinct models of deliberate practice. Each model is suitable for certain activities or skills. Sometimes mastering complex skills requires the use of all three models. They are quite useful in inspiring you to come up with new exercises or in identifying strategies to address weaknesses.

In this article, you will be introduced to these three models and will learn how to apply them to the training world.

One of the biggest and perhaps saddest trends in our era is that attention spans are shrinking. It is primarily fuelled by the explosion of online content, rise of social media and the ever-increasing range of things to obtain and experience. It is great to be living is such a rich world, the like of which we have never had in the entire history of mankind. However, there is a price to pay for anything good and in this case, it seems to be our shrinking attention spans, increased stress and the feeling that there is so much to do in so little time.

To learn how to manage attention, there are several exercises you can go through to reverse the trend and gain more control. In this article, you will be introduced to a series of attention management and concentration exercises that will help you achieve this.

“Everything is easier than you think. If you believe otherwise, you are setting yourself up for a hard life.”

Learning should not be as hard as you think. There is a method to the art and just like any skill, learning to learn needs practice and mastery. It is much like speed reading. If you know how to read faster, you can end up reading more books in a given time. Similarly, if you learn how to learn efficiently you can spend less time doing the learning and more time enjoying what you have learned.

As a trainer, the topic of learning to learn is even more important since it is not only beneficial to you, but it also helps you to improve your training. As such, it is worth investing time in.

In this article, you will be introduced to seven highly effective techniques that help you maximise learning in a given time. The following methods are presented as if you are applying them to yourself, but you should consider how you can take advantage of them for your learners in a training environment.

When delivering training courses, sometimes you need to get the delegates go through an exercise that involves sorting cards. Card sorting is a training activity where you get the delegates to think about a subject and vote by sorting a number of options. Sometimes they may need to generate these options before sorting them. Usually, the aim is to pick the best option or find a consensus on how to move forward.

Here, you will be introduced to a variation of card sorting that makes the process systematic for a group of delegates and allows them to make a decision collectively.

This is an effective exercise to help delegates review the topics covered in the course systematically at the end of a course. It is designed to be participatory rather than competitive and the main aim is to simply refresh the delegates’ minds about what has been covered in the course, in particular the earlier content.