Train the Trainers: "Training from the back of the room"

Thursday and Friday of this week I attended the train the trainers event “Training from the back of the room” that was appended to the Scrum Gathering in Amsterdam. The training with Sharon Bowman was awesome.
I had already read the first half of her book (“Training from the back of the room”) but the training itself showed me how radical the concept really is meant. I have the subjective impression that Sharon talked less then 60 minutes during the two day training. The rest of the training was done by the 35 participants – everybody in action all the time. Everybody walked, talked, wrote and discussed all the time. This type of training reflects current brain research insights. Sharon describes the principles with 6 trumps:

1. Movement trumps sitting. So we moved all the time and sat down very seldom.
2. Talking trumps listening. We talked in pairs or in small groups during the whole training.
3. Images trump words. Whenever possible Sharon used drawings, metaphors, stories etc.
4. Writing trumps reading. We read few things and wrote down insights individually or as a workgroup.
5. Shorter trumps longer. The content delivery was split up in very small chunks, each shorter than 10 minutes.
6. Different trumps same. We applied lot’s of different practices to learn the content.

I highly recommend the training and the book to everybody who does training.

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