Thursday

Last day!

Today was a light day, and not just because it was 1/2 day. After a brief review of the week's activities, we discussed our different roles at our plants. There was a lot of talk about suggesting a standardized role. Most of the class claimed that they spent about 30% of their time on their core IT duties, and the rest on "administrivia" that they were assigned. There was some discussion that ITs need to get more involved in-plant, and about the difficulty of getting notified about TPE and JPM observation opportunities. Duane Arnold has an online tool on their training homepage in which a button sends a mass email to everyone involved in TPE observation that one is occurring in a certain time frame (usually a 10-15 minute window). One of the participants was a trainer in the chemical industry for most of his career, and said that we need to be benchmarking outside industry as well as each other--best nuclear practices may not be overall best practices. Someone else mentioned that hospitals are starting to use the navy nuclear training format, so that might be a good place to start.

We then looked at how the board supplement for the ASER is constructed and where that data is on the INPO website.

The next discussion was on the future of training. INPO has plans in 2009 to expand leadership development courses, improve NANTeL (especially bandwidth issues), and work on methods to bring new workers into the culture. They are also working on NANTeL new instructor training and coordinating with community and technical colleges. For 2010, budget permitting, their goals are to add fundamentals training for operators, maintenance, and technical personnel, and create a common content management system and entry level assessment for initial training waivers and exemptions.

Wednesday

A full day, and agreed by most to be the most productive. We started with Conducting Effective Observations. There wasn't much new here for me, though the idea did come up about doing some CT with supervisors and line managers on good observation skills. Another thing that the IT should probably do is talk about the class with students before going to talk with the instructor, post-obs.

The next session was on Coaching and Mentoring. Some interesting discussion about coaching skills, but what I wrote down was to get or view the Practical Coach video from Coastal Video and Gambler's Dillema from INPO. The powerpoints from this presentation and the one above are available at INPO, or I can email them to you.

The afternoon was taken up with Bill Thompson's presentation on 1.7. I can't do it justice here--or at all--but the gist is to be careful about 1.7 measurements and Bravo-basis CT items on attachment V. They need to be carefully labeled and chosen, and you don't need a whole lot of them because they are work-intensive. However, the caveat is not to completely avoid bravos on the aser because of the workload. Bill's presentation is available on INPO as well.

We then took a tour of the boardroom. You can smell the sweat.

Wow

What a day. I know that most ITs can't imagine that at times the discussion went a little long, but we had to work through lunch and shorten a presentation or two to get done on time.

The day started with a problem solving session, where everyone with a problem brought it up to their table and we brainstormed solutions. There were more problems than solutions. Some of the problems:

• OJT/TPE processes
• Exam security
• Introductory safety topics in GET CBT
• New fleet transition
• IT task standardization/task creep. This one deserves more attention, I think. Line and training managers, according to the discussion, don't really know what ITs really do, and tend to think that we have a catch-all position. There were a lot of questions, especially from newer ITs about a) how to educate our customers on what we do and b) how to find the right questions to find out what it is our training and line managers really want.

We next went through a presentation on the SAT process and a breakdown of ADDIE. Then each table took an objective and tried to apply one or more of the segments of ADDIE to each criteria. The difficulty on many was picking one or two, and not putting evaluation on each of them. A couple of interesting notes came up. First, findings in Objective 2 are usually found by pulling a string from a finding in one of the other objectives i.e. the problem usually shows up somewhere else and is drilled down to Objective 2. That's not to say that everything goes back there, but that O.2 findings rarely show up on their own; it's kind of like Lyme Disease showing up as rheumatoid arthritis--it's masked under other symptoms. Second, and this is direct from Paul Manning, not everything has to meet 1.7. Not everything we teach needs performance measures.

Following was role in station training. It was said that ITs need to be in the plant observing and digging--be hands on rather than an academic in a cube. Another suggestion was to observe post-evaluation simulator critiques as a model for coaching. One plant has their instructors check quals in class before teaching starts, and they have a 2-minute drill at the beginning of class and after each break. A side note on this, and as a reminder to myself, I need to look up Tim Carter and his theories on generational learning; he says that the differences are overblown.

We went through the training warning flags and suggested solutions during an abbreviated working lunch.

Most of the afternoon was a fun session on learning theory. We were broken up into teams and given 100 index cards. Following certain guidelines and rules, we were to build the tallest tower within 10 minutes. My team won by a long shot. This was, however, a prelude to performing a gap analysis (by the losers--why'd they lose?), writing objectives for KSA, and then developing activities to train the procedure. Our objectives and activities were voted the best too...well, it was a tie. We were giving Addendum IV to ACAD 88-002 for a job aid. Thanks for making me read that already, Bill. It would be a great CT activity if it weren't so long--which is, in fact, the reason we won. We balanced structural integrity and aesthetics against time pressure, while other teams tried more for pretty, solid, or fast. While that didn't turn into the focus of the discussion, I think it's a reality-based topic that seminars like this could get into.

Paul Manning (are you paying attention Bill?) led a discussion of creative web searching. I left his list in my folder over at INPO; I'll post it later, but some other links included

http://www.copyright.mnscu.edu/clearinghouse_roster.htm for copyright owners

http://www.presentationzen.com/ with a list of public domain images

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html with a mindmap of GFES topics

OSHA's website was also brought up, as was a Pixar short entitled "Lifted," which is a good, funny depiction of TPE. It's available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NO2MbkIpxo, and I believe can be copyright cleared for training.

The last of the day was NANTel presenting some basics on the system. I think we'll have more on the last day about this. However, I know that our site has a lot of redundant material between NANTel and our site-specific CBT. We need to address this, and I believe that NANTel would be willing to help. Also, some sites have the supplemental personnel vendors clear the contractors through NANTel before they come on site, which saves the plant time & money, especially before an outage.

Off to dinner soon and an early night to bed. This is exhausting. Tomorrow's theme is Influencing Others, and includes Observation Skills, Coaching and Mentoring, and a long session on 1.7.

Please feel free to comment, disagree, coach, and/or reinforce.

Monday:

Atlanta has no gasoline. If you're thinking about driving here, do so in your own tanker truck. Ignore the mile-long line of people trying to follow you to a BP.

Meeting started at noon, with introductions of the instructors and of the students. I'm not the only IT with no prior nuclear experience, but there aren't many of us...yet. Get ready--the numbers show we're going to have to hire from outside the industry and Navy.

Next was a breakout exercise, somewhat of a diagnostic, where the five tables split a 50-question multiple guess test of TSD (not SAT) knowledge. After an answer period, the test was turned into a game where each table read its answer, and the other tables were able to challenge and pick up points. It was fun, but it wasn't the best test; there were a lot of ambiguous stems and distractors.

After a break, we came back to a discussion of our duties. I was surprised at the range of duties that ITs have across the industry. Some of us only coach instructors, while others do everything from lesson plan approval to ASER writing and more. I was also surprised at the disparity in numbers of ITs at various plants. Some of us have 5 per unit, and some have 1 for multiple units. There seems to be little rhyme or reason other than budget.

After another break, Paul Manning did a short presentation on nuclear power that led to the Special Characteristics video. I'd seen it, but it is a powerful presentation of the need for safety culture and questioning.

Off to dinner. Perhaps more posting afterward if I think of anything to add later. Please feel free to offer up your comments to the blog as well.

Edited to add: Bill, I ate at Pappadeaux tonight. You were right--it was delicious.

First Post

Off to INPO Sunday evening for Monday's start. I still haven't received any materials on the seminar, so I emailed Paul Manning. If I don't get a response, I'll go with May's agenda and show up for a noon start.

May's materials are posted at http://www.inpo.org/trainactivities/MtgSum/May2008/main.asp