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Throwing chocolates at the audience

 A few years back I worked with a consultant as a freelance trainer. They said they were content specialists. And that they would want to work with expert facilitators and so on. And I said yes. 

Then they got their client, supposedly understood the requirements and came up with a content pack for 4 hours. 

I went through the content and the content was a pot pourri of slides. There was no structure or framework. All the content was unattributed images from Google with a single text line (after all that was the latest in slide design). Every few slides there was an engagement activity (sometimes directly connected with the topic at hand - at other times irrelevant). Then there were quizzes where chocolates had to be thrown to the audience for answering correctly or making the right points. And there were group discussions where the audience was grouped into teams and left to discuss. Then there were role plays. 

The entire content was grouped like a bad movie. A set of activities, breaks between segments of theory, chocolate throwing, back slappaing. Imagine a movie with the right "ingredients" for a plot but a bad story. 

But to be fair, this was what training was some years back. If you engage the audience well, your smile sheets are marked well and you get repeat business.  And in order to keep the ratings up, I had to think on the fly and create things that were never accounted for in the content pack to ensure that the audience learned. 

And oh, the content pack was made with Google. Type in, pick the first thing that appears, add a jazzy image and put it on the slides. No references, no research, nothing. 

After conducting a few sessions, I hastily bid goodbye because as a trainer.

So, yes throwing chocolates at the audience doesnt work and if you are doing that, you are not a trainer. 

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