How can a regular high school classroom turn to a beautiful “What do I need to know to become a trainer?” guidebook in one week? All you need is two experienced and dedicated trainers, participants who want to learn and challenge themselves, an inspiring environment and many colourful markers. As all of these were present at the Training New Trainers in Budapest organized during the first week of October by the AEGEE Academy and AEGEE-Budapest, we gained a lot of new knowledge, strengthened our training and leadership skills and enjoyed this one-week long intensive learning so much.
During the training, we covered a lot of useful theories, models and methodologies, such as the 4Mat, SAVI, familiarized ourselves with the trainer’s outline which can help us to design well-targeted and well-structured sessions. We also discussed the importance of giving feedback and what should we focus on when giving feedback, that can be useful in our everyday life, not only as trainers. After receiving a lot of input from our trainers, Laura and Christie, it was our turn to show what have learned. We have delivered 20 and 30-minute long training in pairs on further related topics, such as flow, group dynamics, non-violent communication… After each of these short sessions, we have analysed them all together based on certain aspects (goals, used methods, content, appearance and interactions of the trainers), what was well-done, what should be improved. It was a very useful part of the week, as we received valuable gifts, in the form of feedback and have a better idea of in what should we develop ourselves in the future. During the last day, we had also a chance to facilitate experience-based learning sessions. It was great to try this out too and be for a while on a spaceship, in Siberia, in wonderland, on a boat or on a deserted island.
After this week, it is clear for me that being a good trainer could be sometimes difficult, even a 20-minute long session could require a lot of preparation (e.g. you need to prefer sleeping before your sessions even though you live in the party district of Budapest), but it is also a lot of fun and joy too. As a trainer, you could never stop learning.
I wish all of my future trainer colleagues many opportunities to use all the knowledge we got to become great trainers and I would like to thank Laura and Christie for sharing their experience, tips and tricks with us! Special thanks go to the organizers and helpers from AEGEE-Budapest for creating us a great environment for learning.
Written by
Júlia Hanesz, AEGEE-Praha