The hardest thing to do as a trainer is not to teach

Written by Kadi Kenk

I am sure every trainer who has completed the Zero Waste Trainer certification course has heard these questions before preparing a training session: Who is my audience? Why do they care? And what should they be able to do differently after my session?

I ask myself these questions every time, regardless of how much — or how little — time I have been given.

Ideally, I can ask the participants themselves. I might send them a few questions before the training, ask them to complete a short exercise, or simply talk to someone who will be attending. At the very least, I ask the organiser to help me understand who is in the room and what they expect.

Whenever possible, I like to speak to at least one participant beforehand. It gives me a glimpse into their expectations, their existing knowledge and sometimes their assumptions about the topic.

This changes how I prepare. Instead of asking myself, “What do I want them to know?”, I start asking, “What do they need to learn?” Assuming these are the same thing can lead to a horrible waste of everybody´s time, including my own.

Start with a question, not an answer

One of the things I have increasingly come to rely on is starting a training with an exercise.

It can feel slightly strange. We are used to training beginning with the trainer introducing themselves, presenting the objectives and then explaining the topic. Instead, I sometimes start with something that feels more like an exam.

I ask people to solve a problem, make a prediction, draw a model, choose between two options or explain what they think is happening.

And then I wait.

This is not really an exam. It is a way of finding out where the learners are—and where my own assumptions about them are wrong.

It also creates something important: the learners discover what they know, what they don't know and what they want to understand.

This is closely connected to one of the ideas in the Zero Waste Trainer handbook: rather than giving learners the expert answer immediately, we can first give them a problem to work on. The struggle, the mistakes and even the feeling of “I don't know how to do this” can become part of the learning process.

In other words, sometimes the best way to start teaching is to stop teaching for a moment.

The question that takes 30 minutes

More often than not, the first exercise produces questions. And sometimes the first question takes half an hour to unravel. This used to make me nervous. I had prepared my slides. I knew what I wanted to cover. There was a programme. There was a schedule. There were learning objectives. And suddenly the participants were taking the session somewhere else.

I have slowly learnt that this is not necessarily a problem. There are two things I can do.

The first — and still the hardest — is to follow the conversation. This means letting go of some of the content I prepared and focusing on the questions that are emerging in the room. It requires guiding the conversation towards the learning objective without shutting it down.

It is exhausting. It can feel like trying to guide a river without deciding its exact route. The path is not straight, and you cannot predict every turn. But if the direction is right, the conversation can lead somewhere much more valuable than the slides ever could.

The second option is to acknowledge the questions and put some of them aside. If the training needs to cover specific topics, I deal first with the questions that would make the following content difficult to understand. I make a note of the questions that need more time and tell participants that I will provide additional information or answers after the session.

The important thing is that the question does not disappear simply because there is no time to answer it immediately.

The trainer's superpower: knowing when not to answer

There is something surprisingly thrilling about seeing people question their assumptions.

A participant says something that everyone in the room seems to agree with. Then someone asks why. Another person notices a contradiction. Suddenly an assumption that felt obvious starts to unravel. This is where learning can become really interesting. But it is also where time management becomes a superpower.

If we allow every question to open another door, we may never reach the learning objective. This is particularly challenging when teaching about systems. Take producer responsibility, for example. A discussion about the concept can quickly turn into a debate about which is worse for the environment: washing dishes or production of single-use plastics.

It is an interesting question. It might even be a very useful question. But is it the question we need to answer right now? One of the hardest things for a trainer is learning to distinguish between a useful question and a useful question for this particular moment. Not every question needs an immediate answer. Sometimes the most helpful response is another question. One that guides you towards the learning objective you had prepared in the first place. The learning is happening when people continue thinking about the subject after they leave the class-room. There is nothing wrong with leaving also some food for thought. 

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