Reflective Diary Template for critical incident analysis

8 questions to ask and write answer to . Be in blog or in a diary book 

1. What happened/what did I do?

    

2. What is important about this?

3. How did this happen? What are the most important elements?

4. Where else does this happen in my life?

5. What areas am I seeking to shift or prevent recurring?

6. What would I need to know or believe or act differently to be able to achieve this?

7. What would success look like?

8. How could I bring this change  into my activity on a daily basis?

Useful for sales / business / personal life. Reflective diary writing, after a critical incident. Usually when things go wrong. 

Good one for instructional designers and trainers. Will at work learning . com

http://www.willatworklearning.com/

Tremendously insightful material on ID and Training. This one is on the biggest ' on board training mistakes companies do!

32 tweets on Training Authenticity ( from Thiagi - June.2013)

Face Reality

Listen to a 5-minute audio podcast episode on the importance of authenticity in training design:
Episode 11: A Tale from Our Resident Mad Scientist ( http://thiagi.net/podcasts/tgti_podcast_11.mp3 )
After you have finished listening, you may want to review this collection of tweets on the topic:

1. The best type of training is on-the-job. If you training someone to pilot a plane, do the training on a real plane. If you don't want to do that, at least use a flight simulator.
2. Use action-learning approaches in your training design. This guarantees effective application to the workplace.
3. Teach in the real world context. If you are training people to do public speaking, let them practice their skills in front of an audience.
4. Use training activities that reflect what the participants will be undertaking on their job.
5. Workplace activities require teamwork. Therefore, workshop activities should involve teamwork.
6. Contracts with real-world clients provide authentic learning and assessment activities.
7. Encourage participants to apply their new skills to real-world opportunities.
8. Don't use cute fictional examples or fantasy or science fiction themes.
9. If you desperately want to use fictional examples to attract the participants' attention, revert to reality before it is too late.
10. The best way to make sure that the participants will apply what they learned to the real world is to use authentic examples.
11. Don't create examples of concepts that perfectly fit your definitions. Use real world examples.
12. Train the participants to face reality in the workplace. Don't use simplified and contrived examples.
13. Cases and scenarios should not be creative fiction. Use what is happening in the workplace as authentic cases.
14. Except in fast-food industry, real world jobs seldom use multiple-choice or yes/no questions. For authentic training, use open questions.
15. Don't create contrived problems that are conveniently solved by your procedure. Begin with wicked real-world problems.
16. Are you familiar with problem-based learning (PBL)? It can be applied to corporate training to increase authenticity.
17. You are not teaching your method. You are encouraging participants to solve their real-world problems.
18. Read the useful Wikipedia article on Problem-Based Learning. Reflect on corporate training applications.
19. In your final performance test, use real-world problems. There is no need to make up artificial ones.
20. Authentic training encourages creation of polished products rather than prototypes.
21. Authentic activities allow competing solutions and diversity of outcomes. They permit different unique and creative solutions.
22. Authentic learning incorporates a variety of sources and resources including those discovered by the learners.
23. Authentic training integrates principles across subject areas. Encourage cross-functional approaches.
24. Require and reward participants to discover, define, and solve real-world, ill-defined problems.
25. Authentic training requires you stop training and start facilitating.
26. Train authentically by acting as a consultant, not as a presenter.
27. To make your training authentic, require participants to use a variety of viewpoints rather than use a single approach.
28. Don't use activities just for fun or because you have heard that interaction is important.
29. End your training sessions with an action-planning exercise. Follow up with debriefing discussions.
30. Authentic training activities may require days, weeks, and months rather than minutes or hours.
31. Blend learning with application. Incorporate guided practice, coaching, and on-the-job application exercises as follow-up activities.
32. In summary: Use authentic goals, content, activities, examples, exercises, language, cases, scenarios, tests, methods—and everything else.

(article) 5 quaities of a Great Trainers

(1) At the most basic level, great trainers are great communicators.

They bring the fundamentals of language and neurolinguistic gymnastics to the classroom and they are able to adapt them to the audience, the moment and the need in such a way that the rules of grammar don't get in the way of clarity and relevance. Like a great speech, training requires the structural muscle of a solid, context-setting introduction that makes every person in the audience feel like this is a one-on-one, followed by sequentially-optimised content, and a killer close that brings the crowd to its feet and sends them charging back to the front lines with the fervour of a Beckham goal attack.

Old school trainers work through an agenda and knock off at five. Cutting-edge trainers get inside the heads of their listeners and create new thinking, always looking for better ways to get 'the message' across.

(2) Great trainers become as invisible as personal stylists and immediately sense the sweet spot of their audience, quickly adopting their language, worldview, belief systems and paradigms, while tailoring the content to work harmoniously with any preconceptions, even when those preconceptions are the very thing the training seeks to dismantle or shift.

Just try telling the folks in the programming department that you are now a customer-driven entity instead of a technology-driven one - this is like telling a room full of conservatives that they must now send a monthly contribution to a national healthcare centre - and you'll see the need for something that goes far beyond the scope of old school.

(3) Great trainers are light on their feet.

They know that in every audience there awaits a cunning saboteur, waiting for just the right moment to fire off a question that unsettles or challenges them. This challenge can take many forms - it may seek to discredit or show up the trainer, or it may be a genuine disregard for, or disagreement or dismissal of, the content itself. Like a seasoned stand-up comic, great trainers are ready for any and all assaults from the cheap seats, and they don't blink as they deflect or return the volley with credible nimbleness, hopefully not at the expense of the upstart questioner but with the ability to put him in his place if that is what is required.

(4) Great trainers are students of their craft.

Training is nothing if not an exercise in human psychology, and the best incorporate a keen understanding of what makes employees tick into their presentations. All training should be delivered with a strategy at its heart, one carefully conceived through a melding of content objectives, audience profile and the application of the latest thinking in the discipline.

Great trainers are special. They bring skill and acumen to the training room that those executives, while possessing credentials and being well intentioned, probably couldn't bring.

Effective trainers have a spirit about them, and enlightened training managers look for it in their countenance.

(5) Passionate trainers thrive within structure and also when it completely breaks down.

Like pilots whose adrenaline goes into overdrive during a good thunderstorm along the route of the flight plan, great trainers thrive on ambiguity; they find a gap and fill it, they see a pothole and look for a way to make the road a better experience.