Notes from the Field: Training Value of Making Toast

This past Sunday all six of our Orphans of Rwanda interns, plus our two Rwandan staff and current Princeton volunteer, crowded into my living room to participate in a training of trainers on lesson planning. The goal was to get them thinking about how to make training curricula engaging for the cooperatives through solid planning and participatory techniques. Our interns had asked for this training because they want to become better trainers for the cooperatives—something I find particularly admirable given that these are 20-30 year old college students with full class and activity schedules.

The basis of participatory training methodology is ‘tell, show, do’, wherein you encourage participation by minimizing lecturing and encouraging interaction, demonstration and active engagement. One of the activities I use to demonstrate this technique involves assigning small groups to design and carry out a training on totally random skills. In my experience this focused the participants on the training techniques as opposed to the substance of what is being trained.

This Sunday I chose ‘making tea’, ‘using a toaster’ and ‘operating a remote control’ as the skills to be taught. The groups enthusiastically engaged with the activity, excited to employ the new training techniques. That is, until I heard a small giggily murmur arise. As it turned out I had committed culturally insensitive training faux pas # 1-- few of our interns actually knew how to use a toaster. However, instead of making this a stumbling block to our overall objective, they cheerfully assigned our Rwandan staff member and Princeton volunteer, along with one brave intern, to develop the training. The group scampered off to the kitchen in search of ‘training tools’ (i.e. bread) to be used for their session.

I was a bit nervous about how this activity would work out—given the apparent weakness of my original intent. With this group I needn’t have worried. As the group dutifully moved through the steps ‘tell’, ‘show’ and ‘do’, the rest of the interns crowded around the toaster—full of questions and comments about toast production and eager to have a go. We all had a laugh and emphasized the importance of ‘do’ in the steps of training when one intern failed to toast and another reminded him of the importance of plugging in the toaster before operation.

The next group, assigned ‘making tea’ gave me a lighthearted taste of my own cultural ignorance when they decided to use a faux charcol stove for their training. (faux given my desire not to burn down my living room) They accurately predicted that I had never used a charcol stove. It was my turn to realize the value of the training steps ‘tell’, ‘show’, ‘do’ as I became the demonstrative guinea pig on the effectiveness of their training.

During our debrief the feedback the interns gave was particularly thoughtful precisely because they measured their and my understanding post-training as part of the evaluation. Many of them thought they could actually make toast post training—from setting the time dials to unplugging the unit before stuck toast removal with a fork. To their minds this made it a relatively effective use of ‘tell’, ‘show’, ‘do’.

I used my own experience with ‘making toast’ to explain that good trainers are always learning and adapting to their training environment. As a trainer you often learn more from your trainees than they do from you—especially if they are engaged and excited about what they are learning. This past Sunday our interns made my cultural faux pas into an opportunity to make the training even more effective. At Indego Africa we are lucky to have such innovative and enthusiastic youth working together to train our cooperatives. They build the program's sustainability and commitment to using local systems. And now they know how to make toast.

- Amity