I Don’t Want Them to Leave Only Knowing What I Said
RaChe’ in a warm professional portrait accompanying a #WhatRaCheSaid Journal reflection about training, facilitation, and continued learning.
#WhatRaCheSaid Journal
There was a point in my career when I thought one of the best things I could do for educators was make everything as clear and step by step as possible. And to be fair, I still believe clarity matters. I like being prepared. I like having examples. I like thinking ahead about where somebody may get confused and trying to make that part easier to understand.
But my understanding of training and professional learning has changed. That shift did not happen all at once. I had the opportunity to experience the work from a few different places. I coached teachers after they had already received training or been introduced to a new expectation. Later, I helped facilitate more of the training. Eventually, I was responsible for more of the education work myself. So I got to see what happened before, during, and after the training.
I could prepare the information, break it down, give examples, explain why it mattered, and try to answer questions before people even needed to ask them. Sometimes that worked really well. Some educators appreciated having every piece laid out. But there were also times when people came back with questions. Sometimes questions about something I thought we had already covered.
Earlier in my career, I was more likely to wonder whether I had missed something. Did I need to explain it again? Give another example? Add more information? Over time, I started understanding something differently.
Sometimes the person had heard exactly what I said. They just were not finished learning yet.
Hearing It and Using It Are Not Always the Same Thing
There are questions you can ask while you are sitting in a training, and then there are questions that do not exist yet. They show up Tuesday morning when you are standing in your classroom trying to use what we talked about. Now the children are there. Your co-teacher is there. The schedule is moving. The situation does not look exactly like the example from the training, because real life usually does not.
That is when a different question may show up. Not because you were not listening. Not because the training did not matter. You have information now that you did not have while you were sitting in the session: you tried it.
That realization changed something for me as a trainer. I still want to explain things clearly. I still want people to have useful examples. But I do not assume that everybody nodding at the end of a session means the learning is finished.
Sometimes somebody needs to try it first. Then they can come back and say, “I understood this part. This is where I got stuck.” That gives us somewhere different to begin.
I Want You to Be Able to See Yourself Doing the Work
When somebody leaves one of my trainings, I do not just want them to know what I said. I want them to be able to start seeing what the information has to do with their own work.
If you are an educator, I want you thinking about your classroom, the children you work with, your schedule, your teaching team, and what your actual day looks like. If you are a director, I want you thinking about your staff, your systems, your responsibilities, and the realities of your program.
A presentation can look great and still leave too much distance between the information and the person who has to use it.
That distance matters to me. I want people asking themselves: Where does this connect to what I already do? What would this look like in my setting? What part makes sense right away? What might be harder? What would I want to try? What am I still unsure about?
Those questions tell me the learning is beginning to move off the slide and into the work. One of the lines I have been sitting with this week is:
Facilitation is not only about what I prepare to say. It is also about what I make possible for the people in the room.
The longer I train and coach educators, the more important that has become to me.
I Like Interactive Training, but That Is Not the Goal
I like an interactive training. I use activities. I want people talking with each other when conversation will help. I want people working with the content instead of watching me work with it for three hours. But I have also learned not to confuse activity with learning.
I do not need people moving around the room just so the room looks engaging. I do not need a sticky note activity because trainers use sticky notes. I do not need everybody talking at the same time so I can say participation was high. What we do together should have a reason.
Sometimes people need to compare what they are noticing. Sometimes they need to practice. Sometimes they need an example in front of them so they can decide how they would handle it. Sometimes another educator’s experience helps the content make sense in a way my example did not.
Sometimes people need to write something down and think about it before they are ready to talk. And sometimes they simply need the information.
I think that is where facilitation can become more thoughtful. Instead of asking, “What activity should I put here?” I am thinking more about what the people in the room need to be able to do with this part of the learning. That is a different question.
Quiet Does Not Make Me Nervous the Way It Used To
I have facilitated rooms where people were talking, laughing, sharing examples, and jumping right into the conversation. I have also facilitated rooms that were much quieter. I do not automatically read those rooms the same way anymore.
Sometimes quiet means somebody is looking through the material and connecting it to what they already know. Sometimes the content is more advanced and people need a minute. Sometimes they are realizing, “Oh, this is going to change something about the way I have been doing this.” That takes thought.
Of course, there can also be times when people are checked out. I am not saying every quiet room is deeply reflecting. I am saying I cannot determine what is happening simply by measuring how much noise the room is making.
The same is true in the other direction. A lot of conversation does not automatically tell me people are doing something meaningful with the learning. I have to look closer. What are people actually thinking about? What are they connecting? What are they questioning? What are they trying to make sense of? That tells me more than volume does.
The People in the Room Know Things I Do Not Know
Coaching taught me this in a very practical way. I may come into a conversation with a strategy, an example, or something I believe could help. But I do not know that educator’s classroom the way they know it. They are there every day.
So I might say, “Here is something you could try,” and the educator may tell me, “I tried something very similar for three months. It worked for a while, but then this changed, so here is what I started doing instead.” I need that information.
That does not mean my contribution has no value. It means their experience has value too. Sometimes what somebody shares gives me context I did not have. Sometimes it helps me adjust what I was recommending. Sometimes their experience helps another educator in the room think about the same idea differently.
That is one of the reasons I want people’s thinking in the learning experience. Not so I can check the participation box. Because I cannot bring everything into the room by myself. Even when I am the trainer.
Sometimes What I Hear Changes My Thinking
There have been times when I walked into a conversation with one understanding of the situation and left seeing it differently because of what people shared. I think leaders and facilitators have to be able to admit that.
Sometimes we have one part of the picture. The person doing the work may have another. An administrator may see something from the operational side. An educator may see something completely different from inside the classroom. A family may experience the impact of a decision in a way neither group can fully see from where they are standing.
That does not mean every conversation needs every person at the same table. It does mean I have to be careful about hearing one perspective and treating it like the whole story.
If I genuinely make room for people to think with me, I have to accept that sometimes I am going to learn something too. I actually want that.
Making Room Does Not Mean Losing the Room
This is still an area where I am growing. When you genuinely make room for people to contribute, sometimes somebody brings up something important that is not really where the conversation needs to go right now. And that can be hard.
I do not want somebody to feel dismissed. If they took the time to say it, I want them to know I heard them. At the same time, I also have a responsibility to everybody else in the room and to what we came together to accomplish.
If every comment becomes a ten-minute detour, eventually we are somewhere completely different from where we needed to be. So part of facilitation is learning how to hold both things.
I can hear you and still bring us back. I can acknowledge that something matters without trying to solve it in this moment. I can say, “I want to come back to that,” and actually make sure there is a way to come back to it.
Making room for people does not mean the facilitator disappears. It does not mean there is no structure. It means I am thinking about structure as something that helps us use the room well, not something that keeps everybody else from entering the conversation. I am still learning that balance.
A Training Can End Before the Learning Does
One of the biggest things coaching helped me understand is that the end time on the agenda is not necessarily the end of the learning. A training can end at 3:00. Somebody may not discover what they really need help with until the next morning.
That is real. They try it. Something feels different from the example. They realize one part makes sense and another part does not. Now they have a question grounded in an actual experience instead of a hypothetical one.
I do not see that question as evidence that the session failed. I see it as information about where the learning is now.
Sometimes the next support is a conversation. Sometimes it is observation. Sometimes somebody needs to see something modeled. Sometimes we need to look at what actually happened and think through it together.
I do not expect one training to do every part of professional learning by itself. That expectation is not fair to the educator, and I do not think it is realistic for the trainer either.
What Did They Get to Do With It?
So my questions after a training have changed. Of course I still care whether I was prepared. I care whether the information was accurate. I care whether the session was organized and whether people understood what I was explaining.
But I am also thinking about something else now.
A question I carry now
What did people get to do with what I brought into the room?
Did they connect it to something real? Did they have a chance to think instead of only listen? Did another person’s experience add something I could not have added myself? Did they get close enough to the work to begin imagining how they might use it?
And did I learn anything from them? That matters to me too.
I do not want to walk out of a room feeling successful only because I covered every slide. And I do not want educators leaving only knowing what I said.
I want the learning close enough to their real work that they can try it, question it, think with it, and recognize where they may need more support.
Because eventually, what I said matters less than what they are able to do with it.
That is the kind of professional learning I want to keep getting better at creating.
