Trained to perfection - reJoyce!

The teaching team is dynamic by nature and recently we won a contract to deliver a short course on Oral Presentation Skills to a small group of train drivers in Edinburgh. Our resident Commercial Facilitator Joyce took this on, on two slots on a Thursday, in the morning and in the evening, no mean feat by the way!

The course content was varied and covered areas such as presentation skills, interview skills, introduction to PowerPoint, picture manipulation and Windows Explorer. 

Self-reflection

When Joyce was asked by the Scottish Fund for Union Learning for her reflections on the Programme, she noted that It was good that participants could influence the content of the course themselves.  Some wanted to improve their computer skills, all wanted to develop their confidence orally.  No-one wanted to develop reading or writing skills.  Thankfully, not having to follow a certificated course allowed me the freedom to target materials more specifically. We were also able then to look at the complete model of Communication.

So what did the learners say?

Content first:

Everyone who made a presentation (and some completed four) said they had benefitted from the experience.  One said he felt “ten feet tall” for the rest of the day after getting positive feedback from other participants.

Most came to appreciate that there was much more to a talk than they had first imagined – particularly structuring and developing their ideas.

Interview skills were also considered useful.  We analysed job descriptions, predicted questions, and prepared possible answers before rehearsing an interview scenario, and providing feedback.

One participant used some of the time to prepare a short presentation to the union, and came back with much enlightened, and able to reflect well on what had gone well, and what might have been improved.

Another decided that this would be a good opportunity to prepare a talk which he planned to deliver, about his experiences working in both the railway and in the aviation industry, so the range and level of talks we dealt with was vast.  

Lecturer commentary:

All participants developed their computer skills.  They learned to use file management software (Windows Explorer), and developed computer skills using PowerPoint.  These included handling pictures, re-sizing them, adding design features.

Had the course been 40 hours instead of 20, I am confident that I would have been able to put the participants through the full SQA Oral Presentation Skills Course, and they would have been certificated at Higher level.

Shift-working:

On the (slightly) negative side, shift patterns and external training sometimes made it impossible for participants to attend some weeks.  It was therefore impossible to predict which combination of participants would arrive to what sessions, but we coped with that – even if it meant sometimes only one person turned up to a session.

Organisational matters:

It wasn’t clear to us at the start that the same teacher was required for both groups, and I must thank my Head of Department for re-arranging my timetable at short notice.  In the end, it was clearly a good idea for the same teacher to be there to maintain some continuity.

Neither was it immediately clear that I was expected to work through holidays.  I was happy to do this in the February break but had holiday plans for the last week.  To compensate for this, I added 15 minutes to every class so that I can confidently say I covered the full hours required (and often much more sometimes).

Finally, I was surprised to discover that the sessions were timed quite far apart (morning and evening) effectively creating a split-shift.  This created a very long working day for me – especially when I added travel time.  However, I have to say I came to like this “gig”, and didn’t find it a real problem. (Other teachers were reluctant to take it on though because of the difficult hours– just to make you aware of that.)