In a previous post, Update to The Family History Guide Training Pages, we mentioned that Instructor Guides are available for trainers. This article explains their purpose, what’s in them, and where you can find them on the website.

Why Instructor Guides?

The main purpose of the Instructor Guides is to help you prepare to teach a class from The Family History Guide Course Catalog. Think of them as a type of customizable lesson plan for training—instead of building a plan from scratch, you can build on what’s included in the Instructor Guides. (That said, compared to creating your own slide deck, teaching with The Family History Guide is much easier, even if you don’t use the Instructor Guides.)

What’s In Them?

The Instructor Guides may remind you a bit of the Tracker sheets: there is one per Project, and they have the Goals and Choices listed on the left. But instead of tracking progress, you can prepare the class you’ll deliver by

• Collecting activities and tips for Choices. Some tips and activities are provided by The Family History Guide (in grey) and you can add your own as you like, or even remove the ones you don’t want.
• Taking notes on articles and videos. When you select an article or video from The Family History Guide for your class, you can type its title and add notes about it for discussion.

Example

Here’s a sample page taken from the Instructor Guide for Project 1: FamilySearch Family Tree:

The left column has the Goals and Choices from The Family History Guide; the center column is for tips and activities; and the right column is for taking notes about articles and videos (you can add as many “Article/Video – Notes” listings as you want).

Where Are They?

You can find the Instructor Tips in the Course Catalog, which is listed in the Trainers menu at the top of each page. Currently there is an Instructor Guide for each Project in FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Findmypast, with Instructor Guides added for Country pages later on.

In the Course Catalog, each Instructor Guide is listed just below the Project Title. Click to download the Microsoft Word document.