Martin - I have read this through this twice and enjoyed it both times.
This is not going to be easy but we are heading in the right direction and
doing the right things.
As preparation for the job interview as CE here and once in post I talked
to people sho had received training. The enthusiasm could never be doubted
but the educating skills were sometimes lacking.
The Train the Trainers initiative is, and I go on and on about it, probably
the single most important ting we can do if we are to grow the community
and influence potential partners in the UK.
Jon
On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Martin Poulter infob...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
I realise that I hadn’t set out expectations for last week’s training
workshop, and what we’re doing with the Train the Trainers programme.
So, with my apologies for that, here is quite a long essay about how I
personally see it, which I’m sharing with the community as a whole.
I've put it at
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter/Training_on_one_leg
in case you'd prefer to read it on-wiki.
We’re already delivering training in various contexts. A lot of it is
professional quality, because Wikimedia UK is very lucky in the amount
of expertise and experience we have available. However, our luck won’t
always hold, and we need to be serious and systematic.
In the long term we want our training programme to be flexible,
sustainable, professional quality, credible, and owned by the
community. It will be trapezoid shape: an “upper” layer training and
accrediting another layer of trainers, cascading skills and knowledge
through a system that ultimately reaches a large volume of training
recipients. Since WMUK has diverse training needs and we each have
different, complementary skills, our training will be diverse,
avoiding any kind of “one size fits all”. People will be able to
specialise in GLAM outreach, education outreach, events for other
experienced Wikimedians, or whatever they’re best at. They’ll also be
encouraged to develop individual approaches to training based on their
own strengths.
This all means we are going to have to train and accredit people who
train and accredit people who train and accredit... indefinitely. I’ll
call this the Hard Problem. The training workshops last week and
forthcoming in October are our first stab at tackling the Hard
Problem.
We were invited to take part *both* as participants in the training
and as observers of the process. As a participant, I found myself
often thinking “I already knew that” or “I wouldn’t want to do that in
my training”, but I picked up some useful tips and suggestions. It was
as an observer that I really learnt an enormous amount.
We spent a lot of time on social skills: Candy acted in a role as a
terrible presenter, and we had to give feedback. There was feedback on
the feedback, and we discussed the process of giving feedback on the
feedback -very meta! People were generally very good at this task, but
we had to address it.
If you do a lot of training for WMUK, you will face that situation for
real at some point. Someone very like Candy’s character will come to
you. They’ll be wildly enthusiastic about getting their town or their
local society involved with Wikimedia, but they won’t yet have
developed crucial skills. You’ll have to handle that in a way that
avoids wasting that person’s enthusiasm. Wikimedia UK won’t come in
and sort this out: as the trusted volunteer, you will *be* Wikimedia
UK in that situation.
You might even see this problem at a meta level, if a colleague gives
an enthusiastic volunteer really unhelpful feedback which discourages
them. You’ll need to give feedback on the feedback.
We discussed conveying professionalism and authority, and how this has
to be interpreted differently when talking to t-shirted sysadmins or
sharply-suited legal professionals. One participant thought this part
of the training wasn’t relevant to them. At the time, that set off an
alarm bell in my mind, but it seems that over the course of the
weekend this person did come to see this as something they needed to
think about and see that it only meant a small change to what they
were doing.
There was an assessment and accreditation aspect to the weekend. Even
when you already have skilled trainers, this is important. Some people
are excellent at training but don’t know they are, and we saw this
among our group. As a community of trainers, we need to build
confidence in each other, and also to see that people approach
training in distinctive ways. That was a very valuable aspect of what
happened in the workshop.
We talked about coping when things go wrong. If you do lots of
training for WMUK, at some point you’ll be in a room with librarians
or archivists who have the misconception that you’re there to
undermine their jobs. Or the event organiser will have given you the
wrong impression about the audience and what they are
