Badges for Trainers

What a fabulous idea - hats off to Region - now we can all honour our remit as Region Trainers. As well as being consistently badged when we go out into other counties to train. I keep mine in my Trainers bag so I always know where it is. Really good step forward.

Post Safe Space again and again

Full house this week with 15 leaders - all the 16-18 year olds sat on the left and the more experienced leaders on the right (including a mum & daughter pair) there is obviously a lovely rapport in the district not to mention tasty swiss roll! Interesting that those on the left asked for more activities in  the training on the evaluation forms as well as saying they wanted to take time to think about how they would apply the knowledge (never really had much of that response on the evaluation forms before).  Easily got through the full programme but big debate about whether you need to tell the parents you are raising a concern first!

Timed the pre-course photocopying this time and it took exactly an hour - luckily I did exactly 15 copies of each.

Revive & Sparkle - but don't make the audience cry!

My first county day where I facilitated the crying of a Brownie Leader - to be fair it was tears of joy! We ended up with a really emotional session - there were 11 leaders and the overall theme was sparkle & shine so I was working through the 5 Essentials one by one looking at how they could be represented in the unit programme in a fun, enjoyable but meaningful way.

We started talking about GG's new hash tag campaign that had started that week and one of the leaders had managed to save it to her tablet (I had tried and failed) we all watched the video which was really hard hitting. It starts with a group of skate boarders - one of whom is wearing a guide hoody and then we hear the words of (discouraging?) men coming from the mouths of girls in various scenarios. Very effective. The leader in question become quite emotional because she was proud of joining guiding and everything it stands for!

We discussed the Quality pilot and I delivered the message on the programme changes (as much as we new at that moment as this was pre November Guiding magazine) and fair to say there was a lot of positivity about all the changes to come. I enjoyed the session but didn't really stick to the Training Plan (but did cover most of the material - although I forgot to use the red, yellow, & green voting cards) they were a really caring bunch of leaders and I would happily go back there again to train. I was particularly impressed with the Counties merchandise e.g notebooks, pens, A4 folders, shopping bags and clothing - they even had a badge for their county day.

How many extra participants should you allow for?

How many extra leaders should you anticipate for a training? I was expecting 11 so I did a couple of extra's and when I arrived I had 15 on the list, but then they just kept on coming and I ended up with 19 in this room:

Ok we coped but it was tight and apart from opening the windows I had to deviate from the plan further. I split the Promise fan activity and the marking up of the Whatever the Weather challenge of the 5 E's into 2 different sessions. Fortunately the Promise fan template had 2 fans printed on each card and I had a stack of risk assessment templates with me, so leaders could do a fan & immediately follow it with a risk assessment.
                                       

 In reality there were too many questions being asked to stick to the training plan and that was just fine because the training was meeting requirements by answering their questions. On reflection we did cover most of what was on the training plan anyway. I did a couple of activities from "Learning to Lead" which is now back on the website. Hence the sweets for "Walking the line", the post-it exercise asking what gets the girls coming back week after week - turned up some surprises -the most frequently occurring post-it suggested Friendship was the main reason to keep the girls coming back. At the end of the session, when we checked what we had covered and how we would implement, a number of the leaders commented that they need to give more responsibility to the girls to choose and lead. Music to my ears. I felt sorry for the 2 leaders in the group who were obviously more experienced than the rest but the group drove the discussion in the main. Although the Educational Framework wasn't known about at all. Lovely lunch with other trainers and that was definitely my last training of 2016. What better way to sign out other than with chocolate!