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NewsDay

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Interacting with your trainees

Opinion & Analysis
Interacting with your trainees by asking or answering questions can make for a very dynamic training and learning environment where everyone is learning directly or indirectly from responses.

Interacting with your trainees by asking or answering questions can make for a very dynamic training and learning environment where everyone is learning directly or indirectly from responses. Opinion by Paul Nyausaru

It has been noted that trainees will come away from the training session feeling good at being active part of the training process. Of course, we can say the opposite is also true.

There will be some in your participants who will leave your training session feeling frustrated, confused and/or upset at your response to their particular questions or because you didn’t answer their question the way they wanted.

Depending on what method of instruction you are using, managing and answering questions from your trainees is an integral part of your training session.

Your trainees will quickly adapt to your style ofpresentation if you ask a lot of questions during the training session resulting in them paying attention to what you are discussing.

On the other hand, if you develop the habit of asking only a couple of questions or no questions per training session, they also quickly learn that too.

When you make time during your presentation or training for questions and answers, the following guidelines may be helpful.

  • Always turn and face the person asking the question directly. In some cases, you may need to repeat the question. This will enable everyone in the audience to hear it and benefit from the question and your answer.
  • In a situation where you are not immediately able to respond to the person asking the question, do not ignore them.

Make every effort possible to acknowledge the person and their question by either a hand signal or with a nod of the head that you heard them.

  • If you do not know the answer to the question being asked, it is prudent to indicate that you may need to have some time to research on it and provide an answer during the next session.

Trainees will always respect a trainer who acknowledges that he/she still has more to learn.

The worst thing that a trainer can do is to respond with an off-the-wall answer.

As a trainer, there is need for you to remain in control of the training session and put on the check trainees who are out to disrupt the learning process.

It is best to put upmechanism that will assist you to screen those trainees coming up with questions that are designed to disrupt the smooth flow of the lesson.

This could be by way of quickly giving an answer to the question and move on the next point or asking the trainee to discuss the question with you after the session.

So it is important to manage properly the way you use questions during your training sessions.