Coaching Groups for Trainers Training

Coaching groups are a powerful addition to a NST Trainers Training event. They are a great place to process questions and practice the learning content.
Coaching groups serve various important purposes:

• They help the participants/trainers to get to know each other better.
• They create a interactive, peer learning community.
• They provide a great opportunity to increase skills for teaching the Sample Curriculum Session 5:4 Coaching
• They provide participants/trainers a coaching group experience
• They give participants/trainers an opportunity to practice coaching skills and/or lead a coaching group and receive feedback

You can program coaching groups throughout the event – however it works best for you. Plan for an hour or two, depending on the size of your coaching groups. At the All-Africa Trainers Training, we scheduled a coaching group time for each day of the training – except for the “outing” day – which allowed for four group times. The day that we visited the training center, we did a lesson there combining some of the new staff and a coaching group.
The participants were assigned to coaching groups by language to facilitate sharing, but you could use other criteria – training experience, geography, etc.
One of the event design team members (or trainer of trainers) led the first coaching group, then the next three times were led by trainers from each group (volunteers or assigned 🙂 ) to give others experience teaching a part of a session and leading the interaction. Outlines for each group time were provided and the design team member (or trainer of trainers) was available to answer questions, coach, or help the trainers as they led.
Each coaching group time included:

• working through a part of the Coaching Session 5:4 content.
• questions and answers from that day’s training sessions
• prayer time for each other

The last coaching group time also allowed for practice with the Coaching Bridge tool to give the trainers experience with that resource. They coached each other to choose action points from the training and learned how they could use that tool with their new staff. They received feedback on how they used the tool from the leaders and their group peers.

These coaching groups are also an excellent way to follow up after the event with individual coaching calls or small group Skype/Google Chat calls to see how everyone is doing as they apply their new learning to the crucial and exciting New Staff Training process.
I have attached a PDF file of the coaching group daily outlines. Feel free to adapt them or change them in any way that is helpful for you, but they will give you a quick view of the coaching group times .

COACHING TIMES (PDF – coaching groups daily outlines and content)

Let me know if you have any questions about coaching groups as part of NST Trainers Training. Also please comment if you have any addition ideas or tips that you can share with others! Thanks so much!
May God richly bless your investment in developing new leaders!