Today's post is the second in our "Tips for Enhancing Your Training Skills" blog series. In these posts, we will delve deeply into the fundamentals of essential training skills. This blog series, filled with tips from our training team’s collective years of experience delivering CLASS observation trainings to diverse audiences from around the country and the globe, will provide you with tangible ideas about how to be a more successful trainer. 

Today, we are introducing our new series, Tips for Enhancing Your Training Skills. In these posts, we will delve deeply into the fundamentals of essential training skills, including:

• Know the CLASS measure well and anchor your training in the manual
• Insist on detailed justifications and specific observations
• Have confidence in the master codes
• Be patient and limit defensiveness
• Ask participants to help you justify codes.

This month's Affiliate Trainer spotlight is on Marilyn Rice from Richmond, Virginia. Marilyn is a veteran CLASS observer, originally certifying in 2006 after Virginia adopted the CLASS as a part of its Quality Rating and Improvement System. She became an Affiliate Trainer in 2008.

I recently completed a Train-The-Trainer program with an enthusiastic and well-prepared group of CLASS observers. Yet, despite their status as certified CLASS observers, several of them were identifying basic conversational exchanges as feedback loops. 

At some of our recent Lunch and Learns, Affiliate Trainers indicated that they would be interested in learning more about their fellow ATs and the kinds of things they are doing with the CLASS outside of training. In response, we are introducing a new feature we are calling our “Affiliate Trainer Spotlight!” We agree that it would be a fun for all of us to learn more about our Affiliate Trainers and the kind of work that they are doing to promote the use of the CLASS in their communities. If you would like to be featured, or if you would like to nominate a colleague for this spotlight, please get in touch with us at contact@teachstone.com. 

Today’s spotlight is on Kari Price from Lincoln, Nebraska.

Recently, I conducted a TTT program and one of my participants, a veteran Affiliate Trainer on another age level, asked me where her participants could find the practice videos. She knew that it was important for them to review the videos as they prepared to test, but she wasn’t sure how to help them find them.

As CLASS trainers, we want our participants to successfully certify. However, we also know that no matter how good our training skills, there’s a reasonable chance that some of our participants will not certify on the first round of testing. That’s typical and not a reflection on the trainer.

"I’ve completed my training. I’m done... right?"

Most of us make New Year’s resolutions, right? Some of us resolve to exercise more, lose weight, or eat a more healthy diet. Some of us may even decide that we need to work less and play more. But, I’ll bet that many of you may have made a resolution to be more organized in the new year. 

Happy New Year! We hope that each of you enjoyed the holidays and perhaps had the opportunity to get a little rest and respite before diving into 2016.