The following list will help trainers, presenters and managers tasked with the work of teaching skills, transmitting information and changing behaviors that there are other ways beyond slides to make your point more effectively. Did you know that you have a 45% better chance to be remembered by your audience if you involve them in some kind of experience?
Here are some examples of how to teach any content creating active experiences:
1. LEARNING TASK: Session Evaluation
Description: Ask people to evaluate the session. Use an evaluation form or ask people to write something or put a sign on a poster
2. LEARNING TASK: Test!
Description: Prepare an assessment that you can administer at the end of the class to verify that people have learned. Ask people not to sign their test and shuffle the results.Redistribute the tests and discuss.
3. LEARNING TASK: Ball Toss
Description: To review session content, toss a ball asking people to ask you something or answer your question as they catch it.
4. LEARNING TASK: The Next Step
Description: Ask people to describe the critical next steps they will implement as they walk out of the class.
5. LEARNING TASK: Slide Show Presentation
Description: You know this one! Do NOT read the slide show presentation. Limit the content on each slide to a maximum of 3 lines and use plenty of graphics. Distribute the copy of the presentation in advance.
6. LEARNING TASK: Find it!
Description: Ask learners to research something in a book, the internet or somewhere else creative. Provides hints to find what is needed.
7. LEARNING TASK: Demo
Description: Show some critical actions to the trainees and ask them to take notes or encourage their questions. Repeat actions as needed and go slowly.
8. LEARNING TASK: Navigation paths
Description: Ask trainees to create a map of each area of the content or of the system you would access during its typical use.
9. LEARNING TASK: One element per page
Description: Break down the content in pieces and put each piece on a page with a name and a brief description. Use the pages to breakdown the content in discrete pieces for different groups or all for the same groups.
10. LEARNING TASK: Riddles
Description: Involve someone and ask them to impersonate a character from your content. Ask people to guess the person’s identity. For example, for a system roll out, different people might impersonate different forms/documents needed within the system.
11. LEARNING TASK: Team Presentation
Description: Ask the team to prepare a presentation together with another team member.
12. LEARNING TASK: Gallery
Description: Each team creates a poster with a portion of the content for everyone to see. All posters are then posted on the wall and – like in a museum – the class moves around to hear the features of each poster.
13. LEARNING TASK: Quiz Show
Description: Prepare a set of 20 questions. Provide buzzers and start asking questions to the competing teams.
14. LEARNING TASK: Clinic
Description: A task based exclusively on questions collected in advance. Ask the group to categorize them and provide a set of each question to each group. Ask them to answer the questions they know. The other groups question the answers.
15. LEARNING TASK: Case Study
Description: Write a brief story whose content describes a critical learning point.
16. LEARNING TASK: Starter
Description: Ask people to share their personal experience with a question that relates to the content, for example, “What is your experience with …..?” Great for beginners as they relate to new content.
17. LEARNING TASK: Just Do it
Description: People perform the task they will perform as a result of the session.
18. LEARNING TASK: Fishbowl
Description: Have trainees observe others performing a task and ask them to fill out an observer sheet with questions about the task that cover the key learning points.
Please consider this list and—the next time you are tempted to create a presentation—remind yourself of all the options you have to replace your PowerPoint slides. Use this list and add other items to it as you create them in your classes!
Adriano understands how to increase your returns on leadership. He works with professionals in world-class organizations that include Philip Morris, Microsoft, the World Bank, Johns Hopkins University, the US Marine Corps, the State Department and NASA. A skilled experiential educator with corporate leadership experience, he is the Founder & Principal Consultant of ParticipAction Consulting, Inc., a firm committed to help clients redefine change, collaboration and power in their organizations. He co-authored "Teachable Moments of Leadership" with Jill Hufnagel in 2016, on a learning methodology that gets results by going from PowerPoint to …powerful!
Adriano Pianesi | adriano@pianesi.com
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