UKLSI Team Leader Training Course

*Equivalent to a Party Leader to MR personnel.

I’m off to the new, updated and re-written UKLSI Team Leader Course this weekend. It is an exciting time really, having spent several months working on the new course it’s time to put it into practice. The Team Leader Course is the second course to get this major revision this year. The Basic Search Technician’s course had this treatment over our Christmas break, and all the instructors were briefed on it at the UKLSI Instructor Development Training sometime in February.

During the re-writing of the courses, however, it did get me thinking about how other ALSAR trainers manage. UKLSI has constantly been updating it’s courses since 2003 and it takes a lot of time and effort. For instance, for this last revision which was quite a large revision I have to admit, but the principle is the same for all revisions; I re-wrote all the slides for the powerpoint sessions in the classroom, I also re-wrote the delegates notes (UKLSI is moving away from giving copies of the slides to a more readable notes book). All UKLSI courses have instructors briefing notes, containing additional information and handouts, the exercises, objectives, key learning points and so on. This was updated. Of course, all ALSAR courses are assessed so an assessment had to be written. Not to mention handouts, maps and exercise planning.

Writing the stuff isn’t the end of it, however.

I could, and probably did, write some rubbish in some (or all) of the documents; so they are shared around the senior instructors who all read, comment and make changes to the material. Once everyone is happy the whole lot are then proofread and “made pretty” ready for testing. So other UKLSI instructors are given the material to read (or in the case of the assessment take) to once again find errors and issues.

Hopefully all the instructors by now have a good feel for the material to be presented, but briefings and training has to be held to ensure that everyone is teaching the “correct” new material.

Only then is it all ready to be taught. For me, that is two months pretty intensive work – alongside probably the same amount of time for two or three of UKLSI‘s other senior instructors and several weeks for the other instructors.

UKLSI has, undoubtedly, some of the best lowland search instructors in the country. They have spent countless hours with their own countinuing professional development – taking other courses, reading search journals and materials and so on. Not only this they have all had search training development – learning about new search techniques and tactics and how to best teach these. On top of this, the majority of them do teach on at least three or four search training courses a year with delegates from around the country’s ALSAR Units.

Why then, do other ALSAR Unit’s prefer to do their own training?

UKLSI has a search training course that is ahead of every ALSAR Unit’s, its instructors are trained better than anywhere else, and what is more it is available to any ALSAR Unit to use.

Why would you want to continue to teach your own course? Re-do all that work (talk about re-inventing the wheel – its done every time in most Units – if they ever update their courses?), in isolation from other views and the latest research.

Obviously I’m biased – but why more Units do not use, participate and send their instructors to UKLSI I will never understand?

October 6, 2009 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Search Courses, Search Thoughts, Search Training

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