Following the success of the inaugural Chief of Judge Training Workshop that Karla Cole devised and hosted in Frankfurt 2016, an over-subscribed second workshop is being held in Sofia, Bulgaria. The attendees are all qualified to train future FAI judges, but this Workshop - a hands-on experience - has been designed to not only hone their acquired skills but to ensure that future Judge Training Courses are uniform in content and structure.

During her years of being the Chief Judge of Training it became clear that the training methods she had observed around the world varied widely, which in turn planted the seed that future trainers would all sing from the same songsheet, given the right tools.

As a teacher by profession, she has developed a range of teaching aids to impart information, which she has refined and modified for the benefit of trainers of judges.  This is the basis of this workshop.

Monday's agenda is reproduced below and gives a clear indication of what topics will be covered.

The class of 2018, limited to 16 in number, plus a further 2 observers, were soon engaged in active participation in learning aspects that would make them all better trainers. Each topic stimulated discussion often with thought-provoking ideas.

The goal of the workshop is to arm the judge trainers with a digital tool-box comprising aspirational guides and aide memoires, with the first practical lesson being an introduction into 'mind-mapping' which will be one of the tool-box documents.  A mind map is a diagram used to visually organise information. It is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole. It is created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the centre of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept and other ideas branch out from those, often using a different colour to emphasise each branch network. Using this approach Karla tasked two groups to formulate a mind-map, one group tackled the General Section, whilst the other dealt with Section 5.  The assignment soon had each group brainstorming for all their worth, resulting in the following mind-maps.

General Section Mind-Map	Section 5 Mind-Map

This exercise brought the first day of the Workshop to a close with Karla requesting everyone be on time for a 9.00am start on Tuesday morning.