I don’t often teach our training classes in Maven or Nexus, but when I do, I always tend to get interesting classes. I’m halfway through a on site training class today that, so far, has stood out as a unique experience for me as a trainer. Usually you set up your slides, hand out the materials, and start running through the content. It often takes a class and an instructor an hour to find a good cadence for teaching and answering questions. One metric I keep track of is the amount of time spent delivering content from slides vs. the amount of time spent answering questions. I strive for 75/25 – 3/4 of the class is focusing on content, 1/4 of the class is focused on answer student questions.

The first thing I do in my classes is implore (literally plead) with the students to interrupt me. “Ask questions. If you don’t this class won’t be valuable to you.” I do this because all too often I have a class of students that seems reticent to ask question or interrupt. Who knows why, maybe they don’t want to ask a dumb question (those don’t exist), maybe they are taking the class with a manager and they don’t want to look bad? Whatever the case, silence is the worst thing an instructor can get in response to the question: “Are there any questions?….. no?….. anyone? Ok. Anyone want to make a statement?…. no? alright, let’s move on…”

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