It Takes a Village to Train a Class (originally titled: “It takes an idiot to train a village”!)
I’ve been acting on stage, making speeches, and facilitating small and large training workshops for years. And usually I’m not particularly nervous before taking the stage or the front of the room. But this time things were different.
This time I’d be facing a group of Liberian business, community, and church leaders on their home turf. The course material relied heavily on their participation in small and large group discussions. As I told our team the night before the class, if the participants just sat there and expected me to do all the talking it was going to be a very short class. As we held our nightly debrief the day before, we prayed that the participants would open their minds and hearts and embrace the leadership principles.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning, or at least at the beginning of this chapter.
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I mentioned in an earlier blog that my friend Dave asked me to teach a leadership class to a mission team he was involved with and the next thing I knew I joined the team to teach the material in Liberia. I’d like to think Dave is innocent but nonetheless can’t help but think he set out in the first place to recruit me for the task. The course, based on John Maxwell's book, The 5 Levels of Leadership is well designed – |
– for an American group of participants and the assumption that we'd be in a modern hotel or training center in the states. We would have neither accommodation in Liberia.
The course is built around a PowerPoint presentation and we weren’t sure that we would have a projector available in Liberia when we arrived. For that matter – we weren’t sure we’d have power to run a projector! So we packed a projector and even a printer in case we needed to produce any materials on site. Turns out they do have a generator at the facility: they turned on the generator when I was ready to start – and shut it off during the breaks!
Next, I had a bit of editing to do on the course material. For example, the original course included a riddle that had to do with frost on a window. It occurred to me that folks in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of whom don't have glass in their window openings, might not be familiar enough with frost to be able to figure out the riddle. So off I went in search of a more universal riddle.
We also worried about an exercise that involved making and flying paper airplanes. While every 3rd grader in the US knows how to make a paper airplane, it turns out that few folks in Liberia are familiar with the practice. That didn’t stop them from trying and we had a wonderful competition that underscored the learning concepts from the course.
And then there was the diversity of the participants. Young and old alike attended, from a wide variety of backgrounds and organizations. One of the participants, Halana, brought her baby to the class and instantly the girls on our team began to vie for child-care rights!
| At the beginning of this piece I mentioned that we prayed that the participants would, well, participate. We put one of our team members at each of the tables and they really helped carry the day. Whenever the class reached a point where there were small group discussions at the tables, our team kept them on track and on task. They didn’t direct the conversations as much as kept them moving. And in the final analysis that was the secret to any success we had with the leadership class – I was only the “stand-up” teacher, but our entire team showed up to teach this class. |  |
All the credit goes to them for any success we had – they are a great group and I’d be happy to teach anywhere, anytime with them.
