I have just recently been a delegate on a course, not for me
as a trainer, but for me in my role as church treasurer. It was good to be on the receiving end
of the learning for a change and enabled me to get a good insight into the
perspective of the learner.
Venues vary tremendously from client to client and hotel to
conference centre but as a trainer it is one of the areas that nobody tells you
about. Very often you have to
spend the first 10-15 minutes setting up or sorting out the room to make it
conducive to the learning of your delegates. This had been thought about a little in the venue I was
at….yes there was daylight and yes we could all see the screen for the
PowerPoint presentation, but you couldn’t see the presenters and if you had
been at the front you would’ve disturbed a lot of people if you had wanted to
go out for a wee.
People who design meeting rooms, conference rooms and church
halls and want to sell them for training forget that if you are a trainer you will want to walk in amongst your
delegates not lecture from the front...this is especially true if you are an
experiential trainer. Yet the
designers/IT people insist in putting the plugs in the middle of the floor so
you have to tip toe through the cables all day. Or the tables are fixed so that you cannot move them, this
means that not only can you not move from the front very easily, but also the
exercises that you have designed for small groups are very hard to facilitate….or
even just getting people to work in small groups is restricted by the
furniture.
Daylight is also so important for assisting the attention
span of the delegates as well as allowing fresh air to be circulated. I have trained in a number of venues
without natural light and as the trainer you have to take this into
consideration with your delegates and their learning capacity. Last week as a delegate it was great
that some of the daylight was allowed into the room, however because the session
was completely tutor led and driven by PowerPoint half the windows had to be
covered so people could see the screen!!
The other key area to consider is the seating arrangements;
can all the delegates see the visual aids that you will be using? Can they see
you? How well can they see each other?
This latter point is very important if a high percentage of your
programme is based around facilitated discussions. Hopefully as well, the seats
will have arms as this assists the comfort of your delegates. Remember that the mind will only take
in as much information as the posterior can endure!!
You also have to consider the number of people that you will
have attending your session….I was one of 50 people last week, so yes, it was a
lecture not a learning session, consequently there was little interaction
between learner and trainer which for learning styles like mine (active,
participative) was not good at all.
In fact I spent a lot of the time on my social media sites…my apologies
to the trainer but I was bored and that is a whole other subject to talk about
in the future!!
So lets make our learning environments more conducive to
learning and ensure that our learning outcomes are met and we don’t bore our
delegates to death!!
Thanks for your time, Suzanne Unsworth
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