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October was a very exciting and very challenging month for me since I got to spend a month in one of my favorite locations – Spain. One of the more interesting insights that came out of that experience was to see how much nonessential information I have been communicating in my Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course and how little I really need to teach for the participants to do well on the exam.
IME, when you are completely fluent in a language, you can get a bit lazy with the way you describe your ideas and how you teach. Since language is open-ended and error-friendly, if you make a mistake, or have trouble communicating a complex idea, it is easy to backtrack and try again until you get your point across. When communicating in a different language, I found that process is much more difficult. Sometimes you just don’t know the vocabulary to communicate what you are trying to say. Or you butcher your idea by creating a long, tortured sentence with complex verb tenses and everyone ends up lost – including yourself!!
Luckily, while I was in Spain my training colleague, Antonio Menchero, made this suggestion – add to your training materials a summary of key concepts you want to the participants to remember in the form of a bulleted list. For example, this is an English version of the summary I use when teaching about the Scrum Roles in my CSM class.
In Summary… The Roles of Scrum
Using a summary is common teaching practice in Spain and so far the learners in my English language courses have liked the list. From a learner’s perspective, providing a summary allows them to listen to me and think through my ideas without worrying about which ideas are the important ones to capture. From the instructor’s perspective, if I provide a written summary, then I actually have more freedom to talk about all the nuance since I have made sure the basic information has been covered.