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Even experienced trainers with the latest resources and most interesting training material can be thrown off course by the behaviours of difficult participants. Therefore, it is important to load the kit bag with a variety of tools and techniques to overcome the dilemmas presented by some students.

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Most participants' brains seem to stop functioning when you invite them to ask questions. It’s like at the mere mention of the phrase “are there any questions” a chain-reaction of nuclear proportions engulfs the participants’ brains and they all become suddenly quiet as the fallout spreads through their bodies and renders them incapable of even making eye contact! Possible causes:
marc
Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown in their book “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” (Harper Business June, 2010), examine why some leaders (called “Diminishers”) drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others (called “Multipliers”) amplify it to produce better results. This was certainly an interesting read and I just love the concept of creating a genius factory within our organisations where we have multipliers leading groups of multipliers, resulting in exponential growth and development across the entire business.
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As we enter our eleventh year and our third incarnation of the Cert IV TAA, I watch with concern a return to the dark days when the Cert IV became just a commodity, rather than the underpinning standard for quality training and assessment for our industry.
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Having just returned from the Training and Performance Improvement Conference in Minneapolis, USA, I was so impressed with one of the presentations, that I thought I should provide a highlights package in this month’s Ezine. I attended a workshop by Becky Pike Pluth on “Teaching from Tinsletown” and it reminded me how powerful cinema can be in portraying a message or engaging a response. As trainers we can take short clips to reinforce a point, evoke an emotion or to quickly build understanding of the topic in a non-threatening way.

marc

I recently returned from the 17th International Conference on Learning in Hong Kong with a renewed vigor to drive our special brand of training forward with some new ideas and perspectives. It was a conference which reminded us of the rapid changes we have all experienced in our sector and of the exciting things to come. Although, I did get a sense that most from the establishment were looking for ways to hang on to their thrones, rather than abdicate to a new regime, which was disappointing.

marc

I was at the VET Teaching Conference held in Brisbane during May and one of the speakers sparked my interest with the question of Reform or Transform? She reminded us that our industry is seemingly always in reformation… so when will we be finished? When will we be reformed? This got me thinking. As practitioners, the “reform” agenda is not one of our making. It is usually imposed by government and every 5 years or so, someone comes along and decides that their legacy activity will be to fix VET. However, we have a system which is the envy of the world.

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