Training Design, Delivery, and Diplomacy: An Educator’s Guide

Veteran instructional coaches A. Keith Young and Tamarra Osborne provide practical advice for trainers seeking high-leverage strategies for successful professional trainings.

How do you see yourself as a trainer? Are you occasionally extraordinary, or do you flail about a bit? Are you connected to a helpful community of other trainers, or are you just starting out and feeling isolated and alone in your job? Do your workshops end with thunderous applause, or do you have nightmares about participants gazing into the middle distance and leaving with little more than they started with?

Odds are, you've experienced multiple successes and failures—and that's OK! Regardless of your starting point or previous experiences, Training Design, Delivery, and Diplomacy outlines the essential components you need to build a powerful training program.

Young and Osborne (coauthors of The Instructional Coaching Handbook) present dozens of strategies to help both novice and expert trainers avoid common (and not-so-common) training pitfalls, enabling the design and delivery of powerful sessions where folks walk away energized with new skills and understanding.

They also introduce valuable tips for engaging participants and managing challenging behavior with diplomacy. Finally, they offer guidance on building and maintaining an effective train-the-trainer program and suggestions for conducting virtual activities in an online setting.

If you feel a bit lost in your own workshop planning, this is exactly the little presentation skills book you’ve been looking for!

A. Keith Young is an education coach, trainer, and writer. After a short stint at seminary, he pivoted to teaching secondary students English and math. Eventually, Keith shifted to training teachers and leading school improvement efforts at the district level. Later, he became a principal, leading school turnaround work and regularly increasing student outcomes by double digits in Colorado, Puerto Rico, and Arizona. Keith now trains and coaches administrators, school leadership teams, and teacher coaches. As a trainer, he maintains a progressive philosophy and teaching style that embraces the best of constructivism and direct instruction. As a coach, he's known for telling it like it is and using a blended coaching model.

Tamarra Osborne is a project manager, trainer, and coach with WestEd, a national nonprofit in San Francisco, California. Tamarra's philosophy of early education favors students learning through experiences and using play to learn academics. She is known as an effervescent trainer and technical coach who sees the heart of a problem and provides sensible, warm-hearted solutions. Her training topics include formative assessment, curriculum development, presentation skills, implicit bias, and educational technology. Tamarra is proud to be published in Young Children magazine from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.