101 Ways to Make Learning Active Beyond the Classroom


Book Description

Fresh, creative strategies guaranteed to enliven online training 101 Ways to Make Learning Active Beyond the Classroom provides proven, practical strategies, activities, and tips for those tasked with facilitating training in any subject area among alternative settings. Based on the best-selling Active Training approach, these methods have been designed by recognized experts, and are guaranteed to enliven any learning event. Readers will find a toolkit of ready-to-use exercises and tips for organizing, conducting, and delivering active learning, in alternative settings on the job or around the world. The book is organized in a way that allows trainers to quickly and easily identify strategies that hold the most promise for specific situations. Each strategy is illustrated with a case example that demonstrates the concepts in action. Two hundred tips organized in twenty how-to lists will prove invaluable for using Twitter, coaching virtually, encouraging informal learning, opening interactive virtual learning sessions, and much more. Coverage includes best practices for social media and informal learning, common e-learning tools, as well as guidance toward using a full gamut of tools from gamification and simulation to serious games and m-learning. Active training encourages participants to use their brains to study ideas, solve problems, and apply what they've learned. It's a fast-paced, fun, supportive, and personally engaging environment. This book shows training facilitators the proven techniques that help learners get more out of the material. Design a more engaging learning environment Improve delivery with optimized technology Utilize effective learning tools and practical strategies Learn best practices for social media, coaching, virtual learning, and more Learners need to figure things out by themselves, ask questions, practice skills, and transfer skills and knowledge to the job. With proven strategies designed by industry leaders, 101 Ways to Make Learning Active Beyond the Classroom is the indispensable guide to the design and delivery of effective alternative ways to learn.




101 Ways to Make Training Active


Book Description

When it was first published in 1995, Mel Silberman's 101 Ways to Make Training Active became an instant bestseller. Now this revised and updated second edition offers the same dynamic approach and several completely new case examples. The examples support each exercise and highlight real-time uses of the highly successful Active Training method. In addition, the book includes 200 training tips that form the nuts-and-bolts of successful active training. These tips incorporated in the book's top ten lists show how to build quality, activity, variety, and direction into your training programs. For the first time 101 Ways to Make Training Active features a CD-ROM containing all the original "Top Ten Trainers Tips and Techniques" lists for easy reproduction and distribution.




Active Training


Book Description

The all-time bestselling training handbook, updated for new technologies and roles Active Training turns instructional design on its head by shifting the emphasis away from the instructor, and on to the learner. Comprehensively updated to reflect the many developments in the field, this new fourth edition covers the latest technologies and applications, the evolving role of the trainer, and how new business realities impact training, advancing new evidence-based best practices for new trainer tasks, skills, and knowledge. Up to date theory and research inform the practical tips and techniques that fully engage learners and help them get the most out of sessions, while updated workplace examples and revised templates and worksheets help bring these techniques into the classroom quickly. You'll gain insight into improving training evaluation by using Return on Expectations (ROE), learn how to extend the value of training programs through transfer of learning, and develop fresh, engaging methods that incorporate state-of-the-art applications. Active Training designs offer just the right amount of content; the right balance of affective, behavioral, and cognitive learning; a variety of approaches; real-life problem solving; gradual skill-building; and engaging delivery that uses the participants' expertise as a foundation for learning. This book is the classic guide to employing Active Training methods effectively and appropriately for almost any topic. Learn how the trainer's role has changed Engage learners through any training delivery method Inspire collaboration and innovation through application Overcome the challenges trainers face in the new business environment Active Training methods make training sessions fun, engaging, relevant, and most importantly, effective. Participants become enthusiastic about the material, and view sessions as interesting challenges rather than as means to fulfill requirements. To bring these widely endorsed methods into your training repertoire, Active Training is the complete practical handbook you need.




A Guide to Teaching in the Active Learning Classroom


Book Description

While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room’s central focal point and disrupt the conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed.The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. The potential they represent can be realized only when they facilitate improved learning outcomes and engage students in the learning process in a manner different from traditional classrooms and lecture halls.This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively. Among the questions this book addresses are:• How can instructors mitigate the apparent lack of a central focal point in the space?• What types of learning activities work well in the ALCs and take advantage of the affordances of the room?• How can teachers address familiar classroom-management challenges in these unfamiliar spaces?• If assessment and rapid feedback are critical in active learning, how do they work in a room filled with circular tables and no central focus point?• How do instructors balance group learning with the needs of the larger class?• How can students be held accountable when many will necessarily have their backs facing the instructor?• How can instructors evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in these spaces?This book is intended for faculty preparing to teach in or already working in this new classroom environment; for administrators planning to create ALCs or experimenting with provisionally designed rooms; and for faculty developers helping teachers transition to using these new spaces.




Active Learning


Book Description

This monograph examines the nature of active learning at the higher education level, the empirical research on its use, the common obstacles and barriers that give rise to faculty resistance, and how faculty and staff can implement active learning techniques. A preliminary section defines active learning and looks at the current climate surrounding the concept. A second section, entitled "The Modified Lecture" offers ways that teachers can incorporate active learning into their most frequently used format: the lecture. The following section on classroom discussion explains the conditions and techniques needed for the most useful type of exchange. Other ways to promote active learning are also described including: visual learning, writing in class, problem solving, computer-based instruction, cooperative learning, debates, drama, role playing, simulations, games, and peer teaching. A section on obstacles to implementing active learning techniques leads naturally to the final section, "Conclusions and Recommendations," which outlines the roles that each group within the university can play in order to encourage the implementation of active learning strategies. The text includes over 200 references and an index. (JB)




Making Thinking Visible


Book Description

A proven program for enhancing students' thinking and comprehension abilities Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study. Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines?small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps?as well as the documentation of student thinking. Using this process thinking becomes visible as the students' different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon. Helps direct student thinking and structure classroom discussion Can be applied with students at all grade levels and in all content areas Includes easy-to-implement classroom strategies The book also comes with a DVD of video clips featuring Visible Thinking in practice in different classrooms.




Academically Adrift


Book Description

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.




Make It Stick


Book Description

To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.




Student Engagement Techniques


Book Description

Keeping students involved, motivated, and actively learning is challenging educators across the country,yet good advice on how to accomplish this has not been readily available. Student Engagement Techniques is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions motivate and connect with their students. The ready-to-use format shows how to apply each of the book's techniques in the classroom and includes purpose, preparation, procedures, examples, online implementation, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources. "Given the current and welcome surge of interest in improving student learning and success, this guide is a timely and important tool, sharply focused on practical strategies that can really matter." ?Kay McClenney, director, Center for Community College Student Engagement, Community College Leadership Program, the University of Texas at Austin "This book is a 'must' for every new faculty orientation program; it not only emphasizes the importance of concentrating on what students learn but provides clear steps to prepare and execute an engagement technique. Faculty looking for ideas to heighten student engagement in their courses will find usefultechniques that can be adopted, adapted, extended, or modified." ?Bob Smallwood, cocreator of CLASSE (Classroom Survey of Student Engagement) and assistant to the provost for assessment, Office of Institutional Effectiveness, University of Alabama "Elizabeth Barkley's encyclopedia of active learning techniques (here called SETs) combines both a solid discussion of the research on learning that supports the concept of engagement and real-life examples of these approaches to teaching in action." ?James Rhem, executive editor, The National Teaching & Learning Forum




Get Active


Book Description

Active learning spaces offer students opportunities to engage, collaborate, and learn in an environment that taps into their innate curiosity and creativity. Students well versed in active learning - the capabilities that colleges, vocational schools and the workforce demand - will be far more successful than those educated in traditional classrooms. Get Active is a practical guide to inform your thinking about how best to design schools and classrooms to support learning in a connected, digital world. From classroom redesigns to schoolwide rennovation projects and new building construction, the authors show the many ways that active learning spaces can improve the learning experience.