For several years, Joan Butts, as the Teacher-Trainer for the Australian Bridge Federation, has travelled from one end of the country to the other. She presents the training program developed by Audrey Grant’s Better Bridge, for which permission has been given to use in Australia.

The program includes the Cards–on–the–Table method for conducting bridge lessons, and the number of teachers interested in listening to such novel ideas for teaching bridge has steadily increased.

In August, Joan was in the ‘outback’ of New South Wales, and before the event, said: “The Australian Bridge Federation wants to also reach out to teachers in the countryside, those from the smaller towns. We expect only a handful of teachers to attend, but we still think it’s a good idea.”

The day before the event, Joan called back with an update and an air of excitement: “We’ve got almost fifty teachers, and in the next couple of days, I’ll be doing a demonstration lesson to over a hundred students!”

It was going to be a challenge, but she was certainly up to it. So what happens in these training sessions, and why did they become so popular in Australia?

Teachers are shown how to change from always using the blackboard, flipchart, or PowerPoint presentations to a much more hands-on, carefullystructured presentation. The methods work well, and word-of-mouth gets more teachers interested.

More students stay in the class, and the classes are more successful. But it is not easy to adapt. As Joan reports: “One teacher was quite definite; he said that I’d have to convince him to give up using PowerPoint...and he didn’t expect that to happen.” But by the end of the course he said he’d never been to anything like this training program.

Joan added that he got up at the end of the class to address the rest of the teachers and said that the next time he went out to teach bridge on a ship, he was going to drop his... (pause)...PowerPoint. The teachers weren’t quite sure what was coming after “drop his...” and pictured him teaching in his underwear. Joan said it was one of those times you really had to be there, but it was hilarious.

The spirit and enthusiasm among the teachers and the students on the following days was contagious.