Essential Training Session

• Start your design flow with a ready-made series of drag-and-drop blocks suitable for training.
• Easily adapt this session to any training course you may be running.
• Design a successful participatory learning experience.

The template for a basic training session is based on a learning framework designed by American educational theorist David Kolb in the 1980s and follows four steps:

• Concrete experience, with room for practical, experiential activities;
• Reflective observation, a time to debrief, form opinions on what the exercise revealed, and discuss them with others;
• Abstract conceptualization, when it’s up to the trainer to offer models, theories and frameworks conducive to deeper understanding and, lastly
• Active experimentation, in which participants are guided to begin applying new learnings to real-world situations.
  

In this session outline you will find spaces dedicated to each of those blocks as well as to initial preparation and closing activities.

The most common complaint about trainings is that new skills learnt rarely get applied after the trainer has left. Prevent this risk by including real-life examples, case studies, and giving participants time to reflect on what steps they will take, in practice, to apply what was presented at the training.

This template offers ideas and a general outline of a generic training session, and it’s up to you to fill it with content and activities, based on your topic.

There are innumerable occasions upon which a training course might be useful, such as:

• In a business, to upskill staff in a particular topic;
• For youth to learn new tools or concepts in practical ways;
• To share your abilities with a diverse group who is interested in, for example, learning facilitation (in which case, you might also be interested in our dedicated template, Facilitation for Beginners).

If you are working with a group from 6 to about 24 people, one facilitator should be enough. If your group is larger, consider working with a co-facilitator.

Co-facilitation has many advantages, including allowing you to learn together, and it can always be beneficial to have more than one person paying attention to group dynamics.

During training sessions, having one person dedicated to content delivery while the other focuses on leading practical activities can be a very effective way of dividing the workload.

For more on this topic you can read our complete guide to co-facilitation. And remember SessionLab’s planner is designed to make it easy for you to share sessions and collaborate with your facilitation team!