Training Training Day

One of the most common tropes in the world of development is the Training of Trainers, or ToT. Training is expensive; if you run the math it can seem terribly costly to give 12 people a grounding in, say, principles of party platform development. However, if instead it's Training of Trainers then hey presto! You're not just training 12 people; you're indirectly training perhaps 120, and they'll train 1200, and before you know it your aunt from Albuquerque will be eagerly calling you to share the basics of party platforms.

Suffice it to say that is easier said than done. Nonetheless, that's what I was attempting last week with a group of citizen journalists on the topic of digital security; here's a few thoughts.

Teaching is hard, as those of you who have done it before know. I've learned from the best and the worst (yes, I'm looking at you, Professor Goldfeather).  In my case, last week it was doubly challenging to keep everyone engaged: if your audience has built their career on social media they're not going to enjoy entirely unplugging for you.

Training trainers is a twofold challenge:

1. They need to truly understand the skills.
2. They need the ability to pass them on.

To achieve the first we spent half our time focused on the content and hard skills. In this case, the topic was tools and techniques to keep yourself safe online (thanks, Tactical Tech Security-in-a-Box!).

To try and get at the second, we spent the balance of our time talking discussing the logistics of leading a class, talking time management, sharing icebreakers, and actually - wait for it - training.

It is very hard to convey anything to people just by talking at them. It's probably harder with a solid-block-of-text PowerPoint. I'm a big believer in teaching with scrawling across loads of flip chart pages, a lot of gesticulating, and making people work hands-on as much as possible. However, this is not the way most of the world is taught how to learn, and it's certainly not the way our participants intended to teach. We had to really push them to break away from their slide decks.

The final activity of the event was splitting into thirds and giving everyone a half hour to train one aspect of the very complex world of digital security. Some were quite nervous, but most of them actually were excellent speakers and teachers. After each segment, the rest of the group gave them feedback on their training style.

Their next goal is to send to us completed curriculum and a plan for how they will do their training. We'll vet those, provide feedback, and send them on their way.

Given all the challenges of learning the subject material and being a successful trainer you've gotta be realistic about the yield you'll get from a ToT. Honestly, we'll be happy if 10% of these participants pull it off. Of course, then they'll train 50 people, and they'll train 500, and...

A few other random tips:

• We had mandatory "office hours" in the evening. This gave us some quality, one-on-one time with each of them, and kept the crew focused on the work.
• Coffee and coffee breaks are necessary. (Or tea, if you insist). You're better off giving longer breaks so people can do things like email and Facebook. Similarly, give folks a long lunch. Any techies need some quality time with their computer if you expect them to pay attention the rest of the time.
• Running a ToT gets a bit meta. You have to make sure you're using the best practices you are proposing they use.
• Get there a day early to set up the room. There's always issues with the way things are arranged, with the wireless, with power, and so on.
• If you're doing things hands-on (which you should!) everything will take waaaay longer than you think. It is gonna take forever for some folks to walk through the steps of, say, creating a TrueCrypt volume, and others will be done and bored.
• Get an assistant. Especially to help with the hands-on part, you need another pair of eyes and hands. It's also good to tag-team the talking.
• Hydrate. But when isn't that good advice?