On Saturday 17th November Kate Baade and Nathan Wale spoke at the IATEFL BESIG 2012 conference. We had a room full of participants, and as part of the BESIG online conference program, we also spoke to individuals around the world as well as groups in Croatia and Uruguay.

Our theme was “Keeping long-term training programs alive” and our aim was to give trainers some tools and ideas to help keep their programs alive. We also wanted to show how easy it is to move outside our comfort zone and try new ideas and techniques out.

How to handle long-term courses

We started off by throwing some questions out to the audiences to establish how many people have long-term courses, how you would define a long-term course and, and here comes the honesty part, how long it takes as a trainer to use up your “bag of tricks”. Plenty of answers came in – almost everyone had long-term courses, but the definition depended on the individual and ranged from a few months to 25 years.   Responses to the “bag of tricks” question were individual, but largely depended on how big your “bag of tricks” is.

There was a lot great information shared and ideas generated.  For all the information presented, and the tips and pointers that resulted from the workshop, click here to download a printable version.

Anyone have any additional ideas to share or feedback on how things worked?  Let us know below in the comments field.