Current healthcare crises and shelter-in-place orders, coupled with strained systems and budgets require educators to become more creative, redirecting learners from the distractions of the day and helping them to engage and focus. In attending this workshop, you will learn to manipulate the inherent risks that go into learning within a group, as well as abate the consequences, particularly for those who feel their personal or professional reputations are at stake! Utilizing simple, easily accessible tools, and crafting probing debriefs that follow the knowledge and insight acquisition of your target audience, you will direct learning not by being some sage on the stage, but rather by fostering reflection among your students. In doing so, you will help develop their critical thinking skills and leave them thinking about the lesson long after it is finished! This workshop utilizes economical teaching aids, and will provide you with additional ideas and resources, no matter what you teach!
2020 may well be the year we recognize the need to rethink educational paradigms and practices that assume face-to-face encounters with students that are effective and affordable. Strains on our institutions have required unexpected outlays of expenditures to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, a challenge compounded by a more volatile recruitment environment which supports our financial base. Finding creative and effective alternatives has become a necessity while we seek to maintain adherence to principles of universal design for learning.
This workshop provides educators the low-barrier, low-resource tools they need to instruct in a manner that engages learners without negatively impacting budgets. Based on an engaged learning synergogy of teams learning from teams, this methodology is built on shared, common experiences that can be translated into practical and relevant lessons applicable to nearly any field of study. The workshop will be highly interactive, with participants engaging in learning activities which they then reflect upon in small and large group reflections, facilitated by educators skilled in debriefing. Rather than focusing on a single lesson or technique, however, this workshop will expose its participants to several activities, many of which will make use of exactly the same resources, but applied in different ways. These tools, with minimal financial outlay, are reusable to teach nuanced differences in learning based on the needs of the instructor and the class. Particular emphasis in this workshop will be placed on debriefing skills that optimize reflection and learning by building banks of questions that may be employed based on the nature and needs of the learners present.
As a result of participating in this workshop, the learner should:
- Examine and analyze the applicability of simple, low-resource, flexible and reusable learning tools to provide experiences that promote engaged and reflective learning, and
- Create and devise banks of questions for reflection and assessment that may be used to debrief these activities in ways that are relevant to a given group of learners, and
- Evaluate and revise as needed both the activities and the questions used in debriefing by working collaboratively in both small and large group learning.
Time usage will be distributed during this 90 minute presentation as closely as possible to this schema:
7-10 minutes Settling learners into the room, introductions
10 minutes Explanation of the teaching approach, including a discussion about the risks and consequences of learning among peers
10 minutes Activity One
15 minutes Debriefing, with an emphasis on format of the debrief, creating debriefing questions, following conversations for relevance, and working collaboratively to begin crafting a bank of appropriate debriefing questions for individual subject areas
10 minutes Activity Two
15 minutes Self-directed debriefing in small groups with time allotted for creating subject-specific debriefing questions and collaboration among small group members
5 minutes Activity Three
5 minutes Debriefing
10 minutes Questions and Answers, sharing of additional resources