Train-the-Trainer by DataHomeLab

6.4 Briefing Structure

The Pre instructional brief is most likely the first encounter the trainee has with the instructor for that particular training event. While the persons may have met previously, each training event should be preceded by conducting a full and thorough brief. In any learning setting there are three main factors or elements:

  1. Skills to be learned.
  2. Trainees to learn them.
  3. An instructor who possesses these skills, and whose job it is to teach these skills to the trainees.

The three elements are the operational triangle the brief operates within. The first two are fixed for the session: the skills are set by the lesson plan; the trainees are who is in the room. The third (the instructor's relationship to the trainees) is the variable the instructor controls, and it is the variable that decides whether the brief and the session that follows succeed.

The instructor / trainee relationship

The instructor / student relationship will affect the success or failure of the trainees to learn the skills required. The quality of this relationship is factored on the personality and attitude of the instructor. There are many qualities required of a good instructor, but the one major factor is:

Briefing Structure is unusually direct in identifying one major factor and naming it. The directness is deliberate. Of the many qualities that instructors variably bring (technical depth, patience, articulacy, calibration to audience, briefing structure, debrief discipline), it identifies the recognition of trainees as people as the single quality without which the others fail to produce learning. An instructor who treats trainees as a delivery target rather than as people may achieve compliance during the session and accurate readbacks in the brief, but will not produce the participation, the self-analysis, and the durable skill acquisition the training programme exists to produce.

Why Briefing Structure calls it out at the briefing point

The structural pivot of Chapter 6 sits here. The earlier sections set out the operational requirements of the brief (6.1 Introduction, 6.2 Briefing Aids, 6.3 Preparation). All of those requirements are deliverable by an instructor who treats the brief as an administrative event. The Briefing Structure asserts that compliant delivery is not enough: the brief is an interpersonal event, and the load-bearing variable in the interpersonal event is the instructor's stance toward the trainee.

The placement (just before the 6.5 Introduction (General Information) and the 6.6 The A-W-A-R-E Model) is the operational point at which the instructor's stance translates into observable behaviour. The Self introduction in the General-Information opener lands as a human contact or as a status display depending on this stance; the trainee introductions land as a real handshake or as a roll-call; the questioning in the brief lands as a check on reasoning (per 6.1 Introduction) or as a verbal exam; the WSK technique in 6.2 Briefing Aids lands as scaffolding from where the trainee is or as instruction at where the instructor would prefer them to be. The stance is operationalised through every one of these surfaces, every brief, every session.

The "many qualities" Briefing Structure does not list

Briefing Structure says that there are many qualities required of a good instructor but identifies only one as the major factor. The remaining qualities (technical depth, calibration to audience, articulacy, patience, voice, questioning technique, board work, listening) are treated across the rest of the Train-the-Trainer Course Manual rather than enumerated here:

The architecture is intentional. Every section of the course manual treats a slice of instructor capability; Briefing Structure treats only the slice that activates the brief, and identifies the one quality (recognition of trainees as people) that makes the brief land regardless of how strongly the other qualities are developed.

Cross-references