Learning How to Change

Do you fret about having too much teacher-talk-time in your lessons? Do you worry about whether or not your students are actually learning what you are teaching them? Here's an infographic I made on the BOPPPS lesson planning framework. This framework ensures learners are actively engaged and emphasizes student-talking-time and student-centered learning. Be sure to click the link in the infographic to be directed to additional resources that will help you stop all the explaining and lecturing. Remember: telling is not teaching. Hope you like it!

Active learning fosters understanding rather than memorization of facts, as explained by the University of Waterloo's Centre for Teaching Excellence. It encourages students to apply learning to different problems and contexts; it gives students more autonomy over their learning; and it helps students learn how to learn. This resource shows nine different active learning tasks that can be integrated into courses to foster engagement with class material and between students, which will energize a class by breaking regular routine. Of these activities,  questioning  will be the most useful in improving your instructional delivery if you find yourself relying on traditional methods of lecturing and explanation. Questions play such a key role in the classroom, from eliciting answers, to concept checking theories, to following up on tasks. When questions are met with silence, often times it is because of the construction of the question. Planning when to ask, who to ask, wh...

Recently, I was one of the facilitators of a professional development workshop for college instructors. I attended the workshops of my colleagues and left feeling excited that even after all these years I have been a teacher and instructional designer, I am able to learn new things. This old dog can learn new tricks. The topic of the workshop was on andragogy, which was pretty heavy for attendees, but it set the stage well for what followed: lesson planning and lesson planning frameworks, which I have posted about here . At the end of the workshop, the facilitator used the term "exit slip", which is a much catchier way of saying formative assessment,  and gave us a quick task to close the lesson. It was called "Aha!, Huh?, Argh" We were asked to jot down  our lightbulb moment (Aha!), something that we are still confused about that we learned (Huh?) and a moment of frustration based on what we learned (Argh.). I thought this was a great way to provide a refl...

Here is a workshop on a lesson planning framework that works great for college instructors. The instructions for each section of the workshop, including all materials needed, are here in this post.  The workshop is in the form of a BOPPPS, so as you teach it, participants are experiencing a BOPPPS. If you're looking to help your instructors create more dynamic lessons, or if you are training your staff on how to deliver a lesson, this post is sure to help. LESSON PLANNING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP 120-145 Minutes Materials: ·        Post-its ·        Skittles x 12 packages ·        Handouts o    Components of a BOPPPS Plan, o    BOPPPS Framework, o    Sample Lesson, o    Objectives Note Page, o    Identifying and Rewriting Objectives, o    Blank BOPPPS Template, o     Evaluation ...