The five I's of a training session
The day's last framework is the one Friday will be scored against: the five I's of a training session. Introduction — capture attention, set the stage. Involve and Interact — participation, not audience-hood. Instruct — the content itself, delivered with structure and purpose. Intensity — energy managed on purpose, because a session has a pulse. And Retention — the deliberate reinforcement at the end, which she connected straight back to the forgetting curve: without it, the meter runs down the way Day 1's retention numbers promised. She was open about the lineage: the five I's presentation style, with its symbolic images and single words, comes from a mind-mapping master she studied under and still calls her idol — "most of the things I do, I learned from him, and I do a little bit of my own changes." Image and association, exactly the Buzan discipline from our Day 1 and Day 2 mind maps: "I remember a lot of things from his class, because I do image and association." The five I's are themselves a mnemonic — the course practising what it preaches, one last time.
Fifteen minutes has a shape — 20/60/20
Then the five I's were poured into Friday's actual container: fifteen minutes, three stages. Stage one, the introduction — two to three minutes, about 20%: set context, build connection, outline the flow. Stage two, the development — nine to ten minutes, 60%: the core content, carried by instruction, interaction and involvement together, never lecture alone. Stage three, the conclusion — three minutes, 20%: summarise, check understanding, intensify retention. My margin note is just "3/15" — three minutes of closing in a fifteen-minute session, a bigger proportion than instinct would ever allocate, and the same primacy-recency physics yesterday's memory block explained: the end is the second-best real estate you own, so budget it like you mean it. Her scaling note made the structure permanent rather than exam-specific: "if you have one day, six hours — pun sama saja." The proportions hold at any duration; GLOSS and OFF from Day 3 are stages one and three grown to full size. Learn the shape at fifteen minutes and you own it at six hours.
The briefing — pick a song you can sing
Then the briefing for the real thing. Tomorrow the order is decided by drawing lots — "remember, assessment principle kena fair" — the fairness principle from this morning, applied to us within hours of learning it. Topic choice got the day's best analogy: "macam pertandingan menyanyi — pilih lagu yang boleh menunjukkan kemahiran anda untuk menyanyi. Sama juga: pilih topik yang menunjukkan kemahiran anda untuk mengajar." A singing competition is not won on the hardest song; it is won on the song that shows your voice. Pick the topic that lets the teaching skill show. The delivery requirements were blunt: "guna props, guna slide, guna whiteboard — semua kena guna. Tak boleh lecture sahaja. Kalau you buat lecture sahaja, confirm saya fail-kan awak." She wants activity — involvement inside fifteen minutes, which past cohorts have proven possible: one ran a makeup class, brushes and all, "and all the men had fun using brushes." The scoring sheet makes the standard concrete: twenty marks for structure — session plan with learning outcomes and constructive alignment (10), opening (5), closure (5); seventy for delivery — presentation style, delivery methods, audio-visual aids, session flow, non-verbal engagement, participant involvement, handling questions, ten each; and the final ten for the item most people will forget under pressure: assessment of learning outcomes. You must assess your participants inside your fifteen minutes — the whole of today's module, compressed into one scored line. Competent or not competent, out of a hundred.
Case Study
my fifteen minutes, planned against the sheet
Friday's plan, built backwards from the worksheet the way Day 3 taught us to build backwards from the outcome. Topic, by the singing rule: not AI strategy, not RAG architecture — writing one effective AI prompt, using the instruction-context-format pattern. Small enough for fifteen minutes, demonstrable, activity-friendly, and squarely inside my sifu-of-your-content zone. The learning outcome, in LAKU-approved form: given a workplace task, write a prompt using all three components correctly. The 20/60/20 skeleton. Minutes 0–3, introduction: GLOSS opening, with the grab being two real outputs from the same request — one from a lazy prompt, one from a structured prompt — hold both up, ask the room which they would send to their boss. Minutes 3–12, development: instruct the three-component pattern on the whiteboard (props box ticked, slides minimal), then involvement — every participant rewrites one bad prompt from a card I hand out, in pairs, while I walk the room; then two volunteers read theirs aloud and we improve them live. Minutes 12–15, conclusion: OFF closing — outcome check first, and this is where the final ten marks live: a thirty-second assessment where each participant holds up their rewritten prompt card and I spot-check the three components aloud — assessment of learning outcomes, observable, inside the time box. Then one-line summary, forward pointer, thank you, stop at 14:30 on the clock I will place on the desk. Risk register, from the week's own material: intensity sagging mid-development — the pair exercise is the defibrillator; a dominator volunteering twice — the everyone-speaks-once rule from Day 1; my own nerves — the scripted GLOSS opening exists precisely so the first ninety seconds run on rails while the adrenaline settles. And the draw could hand me the 9 a.m. slot — so the plan has to survive a cold room, which is what the two-outputs grab is for.
Reflections
The five I's are the week in miniature. Introduction is Day 3's GLOSS; Involve and Interact are Day 1's engagement rules and Day 2's methods; Instruct is the content-development discipline; Intensity is the energy management from the presentation-skills morning; Retention is the forgetting curve, fought on purpose. Nothing on Friday's sheet is new — that is the point of the sheet. It is a constructive-alignment audit of the whole course: the outcomes were declared on Monday, the methods were taught all week, and the assessment measures exactly what was taught. The course is ending the only way it honestly could — by assessing us with the very instrument it spent four days teaching us to build. What I notice tonight is that the dread has changed shape. On Monday, fifteen assessed minutes felt like an exam; after today's module I can see it for what it is — a performance assessment with a published rubric, a fair administration procedure, and a competent/not-competent judgment resting on evidence. I know the criteria, the weighting, the structure and the standard. Which means, by the logic of everything this course has taught: if Friday goes badly, it will not be because the assessment was unfair. It will be evidence. And evidence, as the fake engineer discovered, is more powerful than a thousand opinions — including my own opinion of my readiness.