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Module 5

In my classroom, I can use a pre and post written assessment questionnaire.  The pre assessment will determine where the student is, what they know about the topic/subject and the post will determine if they've learned what the course outlined objectives were.   In addition to observations, quizzes, tests, and projects.

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CATs are flexible and can be tailored to the unique and specific concerns of the instructor. Most are designed to be quick and easy to use and each CAT provides different kinds of information. Their aim is not necessarily to grade individual student work or to provide individual students with feedback on their performance but to provide the instructor with feedback on student learning.

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Module 4

In my classroom, I will make better presentations by keeping it simple. Have a title slide that peaks the students interest, stick to simple designs, one point per slide, include relevant and meaning images and use a call to action to solicit feedback and discussion.

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Insights from Our Office

Aaron Weyenberg is the master of slide decks. Our UX Lead creates Keynote presentations that are both slick and charming-the kind that pull you in and keep you captivated, but in an understated way that helps you focus on what's actually being said. He does this for his own presentations and for lots of other folks in the office. Yes, his coworkers ask him to design their slides, because he's just that good.

We asked Aaron to bottle his Keynote mojo so that others could benefit from it. Here, 10 tips for making an effective slide deck, split into two parts: the big, overarching goals, and the little tips and tricks that make your presentation sing.

The big picture...

1. Think about your slides last. Building your slides should be the tail end of developing your presentation. Think about your main message, structure its supporting points, practice it and time it-and then start thinking about your slides. The presentation needs to stand on its own; the slides are just something you layer over it to enhance the listener experience. Too often, I see slide decks that feel more like presenter notes, but I think it's far more effective when the slides are for the audience to give them a visual experience that adds to the words.
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2. Create a consistent look and feel. In a good slide deck, each slide feels like part of the same story. That means using the same or related typography, colors and imagery across all your slides. Using pre-built master slides can be a good way to do that, but it can feel restrictive and lead to me-too decks. I like to create a few slides to hold sample graphic elements and type, then copy what I need from those slides as I go.
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3. Think about topic transitions. It can be easy to go too far in the direction of consistency, though. You don't want each slide to look exactly the same. I like to create one style for the slides that are the meat of what I'm saying, and then another style for the transitions between topics. For example, if my general slides have a dark background with light text, I'll try transition slides that have a light background with dark text. That way they feel like part of the same family, but the presentation has texture-and the audience gets a visual cue that we're moving onto a new topic.
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4. With text, less is almost always more. One thing to avoid-slides with a lot of text, especially if it's a repeat of what you're saying out loud. It's like if you give a paper handout in a meeting-everyone's head goes down and they read, rather than staying heads-up and listening. If there are a lot of words on your slide, you're asking your audience to split their attention between what they're reading and what they're hearing. That's really hard for a brain to do, and it compromises the effectiveness of both your slide text and your spoken words. If you can't avoid having text-y slides, try to progressively reveal text (like unveiling bullet points one by one) as you need it.
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5. Use photos that enhance meaning. I love using simple, punchy photos in presentations, because they help what you're saying resonate in your audience's mind without pulling their attention from your spoken words. Look for photos that (1) speak strongly to the concept you're talking about and (2) aren't compositionally complex. Your photo could be a metaphor or something more literal, but it should be clear why the audience is looking at it, and why it's paired with what you're saying. For example, I recently used the image above-a photo of a container ship about to tip over (it eventually sank)-to lead off a co-worker's deck about failure preparation. And below is another example of a photo I used in a deck to talk about the launch of the new TED.com. The point I was making was that a launch isn't the end of a project-it's the beginning of something new. We'll learn, adapt, change and grow.

And now some tactical tips...

1. Go easy on the effects and transitions. Keynote and Powerpoint come with a lot of effects and transitions. In my opinion, most of these don't do much to enhance the audience experience. At worst, they subtly suggest that the content of your slides is so uninteresting that a page flip or droplet transition will snap the audience out of their lethargy. If you must use them, use the most subtle ones, and keep it consistent.
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2. Use masking to direct attention in images. If you want to point something out in a photo, you could use a big arrow. Or you could do what I call a dupe-and-mask. I do this a lot when showing new page designs, particularly when I don't want the audience to see the whole design until I'm finished talking about individual components of it. Here's the original image. Here's the process for masking it. (1) Set the image transparency to something less than 100. (2) Duplicate that image so there is one directly over the top of the other. (3) Set the dup'd image transparency back to 100. and (4) Follow the technique here to mask the dup'd image. You'll end up with something that looks like this. You can use this technique to call out anything you want in a screenshot. A single word, a photo, a section of content-whatever you want your audience to focus on.
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3. Try panning large images. Often, I want to show screen shot of an entire web page in my presentations. There's a great Chrome extension to capture these-but these images are oftentimes much longer than the canvas size of the presentation. Rather than scaling the image to an illegible size, or cropping it, you can pan it vertically as you talk about it. In Keynote, this is done with a Move effect, which you can apply from an object's action panel.
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4. For video, don't use autoplay. It's super easy to insert video in Keynote and Powerpoint-you just drag a Quicktime file onto the slide. And when you advance the deck to the slide with the video that autoplays, sometimes it can take a moment for the machine to actually start playing it. So often I've seen presenters click again in an attempt to start the video during this delay, causing the deck to go to the next slide. Instead, set the video to click to play. That way you have more predictable control over the video start time, and even select a poster frame to show before starting.
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5. Reproduce simple charts and graphs. Dropping an image of a chart into a presentation is fine, but it almost always disrupts the feel of a deck in unsightly fashion. If the graph data is simple enough (and you have some extra time) there's a way to make it much more easy on the eyes. You could redraw it in the native presentation application. That sounds like needless work, and it might be for your purposes, but it can really make your presentation feel consistent and thought-through, of one flavor from soup to nuts. You'll have control over colors, typography, and more. Here are some examples.
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Lastly, I'd love to leave you with a couple book recommendations. The first is Resonate, by Nancy Duarte. It's not so much about slides, but about public speaking in general - which is the foundation for any presentation, regardless of how great your slides are. In it, she breaks down the anatomy of what makes a great presentation, how to establish a central message and structure your talk, and more. (One of her case studies comes from Benjamin Zander's charming TED Talk about classical music, a talk that captivated the audience from start to finish.) Think of this as prerequisite reading for my second recommendation, also by Duarte: Slide:ology. This is more focused on presentation visuals and slides.

Happy slide-making.

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Insights from Our Office Aaron Weyenberg is the master of slide decks. Our UX Lead creates Keynote presentations that are both slick and charming-the kind that pull you in and keep you captivated, but in an understated way that helps you focus on what's actually being said.

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Module 3

In my classroom, I will be committed to my students by establishing a welcoming, positive, and informative environment. I want to inspire my students.  I want them to be engaged with the material and with their peers by using interactive small group settings with robust discussions.  I will use an oral quiz for students to recall what was taught.

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What makes a good teacher great? | Azul Terronez | TEDxSantoDomingo

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Module 2

In my classroom, the key to having a successful classroom session is to ensure my lesson plan is effective. This will include the learning objectives, allowing for bite size lecturing time, time for group discussion and participation, and a reflective questions/answering period.

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Every year for the last six years, I've worked with over 50 teachers to help them become outstanding planners and teachers. This is what I've learned:

Lesson planning is the development of a set of habits of thought, not the filling in of a lesson plan template.

Some habits have more impact than others.

Anyone can learn to be a highly effective lesson planner. You just have to identify, practise and improve those habits which make the most difference in your context.

So the big question is: which 'habits of thought' have the greatest impact?

Cue the 7 habits of highly effective lesson plan(ner)s:

This may sound obvious, but it's not how all teachers start. In fact, it's very easy to fall into one of the twin-sins of planning:

Activity-oriented planning starts by identifying an activity and reverse engineering the learning intentions. Over time, this can develop into an exercise in keeping students busy.

Coverage-oriented planning starts with intentions that have been crafted by someone else (e.g. a colleague or textbook). Over time, this can develop into an exercise in getting through the curriculum.

The alternative is backwards planning: taking time to get excessive clarity about what you want your students to have learned by the time they walk out the door at the end of the lesson. This involves mapping out, breaking down and thinking hard about how the various components of the learning trajectory hang together.

The clearer you are about where you want them to get, the better you'll be able to help them get there.

"I have 4 [lessons to plan], and zero patience for the sort of purposeless googling that my planning used to involve." - Michael Pershan

Don't waste time designing overly complex learning experiences. Instead, keep it simple, stupid. Select the activity which gets your students to the end point as directly as possible. What Doug Lemov calls 'the shortest path'. Get into the habit of asking yourself: what is the least my students (or I) need to do to help them learn X?

While you're at it, get into the habit of asking yourself: what is the least I need to say to explain this concept to my students? What is the least amount of information I need to give them before they can get started?

There is always less to be done.

If you want to improve your lesson planning, you'll need a strong sense of what's working and what's not in your classroom. This is almost impossible to do without reliable and efficient methods of assessing pupil progress. Classic assessment techniques which don't quite cut the mustard include:

Traffic lighting (or variants like thumbs up/down etc.) This approach is riddled with problems and offers a level of reliability that you'd be best to ignore.

Individual questioning Whilst this approach can offer deep insights into pupil understanding, it's a painfully slow way to build up a more general picture of progress.

Instead, try the following:

Hinge questioning Asking the whole class to: answer a multi-choice question using hand-signals; or show their thinking using mini-whiteboards.

Exit ticketing Giving students 3 questions to answer on a sheet of paper which they have to hand to you as they walk out the door.

As teachers, we want to teach in a way that helps students remember. We want to go beyond lesson learning, and build lasting learning. The lowest hanging fruit in this area are practices which take account of how memory works. The next time you sit down to plan, consider the following:

Plan for thinking As Daniel Willingham so eloquently puts it, 'learning is the residue of thought'. Plan what you want your students to think.

Limit multi-tasking Our brains have limited bandwidth, and so the less your students have to think about, the more progress they'll make. Remove distractions and focus on the essentials.

Anchor thinking David Ausubel tells us that 'what students already know is the most important factor in what they can learn'. Design activities to help your students tap into what they know and make connections with what they're going to learn about.

Space the learning Short sessions of learning spaced out over a series of days and weeks will generate longer term recall than cramming everything into one lesson.

Practise deliberately Practice makes permanent (not perfect), so get it right by: practising fewer important things in greater depth; practise complex stuff only when you've mastered the basics; practise things you're already good at; and practise learning from mistakes, not making them. For more on this, I'd highly recommend Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov.

Increase your impact further by looking for points in your lesson where students are likely to struggle, make mistakes or develop misconceptions.

Don't try to stop them happening. Instead, become sensitive to them them, and expose and address them head on when they arise. If necessary, make them yourself.

Learning is a thinking experience that happens over time, not something that can be divided up neatly into lesson-sized portions. The relationship between lessons is just as important as what happens within them. Get into the habit of:

Carving out time during every lesson to revisit previous learning. Be careful not to alter the learning experience too much. You can tweak it slightly, but making it recognisable is better for lasting learning.

Building in time to assess student understanding of what you are planning to teach next lesson.

"The star teachers of the 21st Century will be those teachers who work everyday to improve teaching - not only their own, but that of the whole profession." - James Stigler

Sharing your planning and practice not only brings fresh eyes to old problems and helps us articulate what we're doing and why, but it also spreads our understanding of what works (and what doesn't) amongst our profession.

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The 7 habits of highly effective lesson plans

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Every year for the last six years, I've worked with over 50 teachers to help them become outstanding planners and teachers. This is what I've learned : Lesson planning is the development of a set of habits of thought, not the filling in of a lesson plan template.

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Module 1

In my classroom I will use a variety of tools (lecture, pictures, videos, or virtual reality) to facilitate how the information is learned. People learn in different ways - sight, hearing, doing, and/or touching.

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Module 1 -  Principles of Adult Learning

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Module 1 -  Principles of Adult Learning

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Learning Styles of Adult Learners

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Many people recognize that each person prefers different learning styles and techniques. Learning styles group common ways that people learn. Everyone has a mix of learning styles. Some people may find that they have a dominant style of learning, with far less use of the other styles. Others may find that they use different styles in different circumstances. There is no right mix. Nor are your styles fixed. You can develop ability in less dominant styles, as well as further develop styles that you already use well.

Many people recognize that each person prefers different learning styles and techniques. Learning styles group common ways that people learn. Everyone has a mix of learning styles. Some people may find that they have a dominant style of learning, with far less use of the other styles. Others may find that they use different styles in different circumstances. There is no right mix. Nor are your styles fixed. You can develop ability in less dominant styles, as well as further develop styles that you already use well.

Using multiple learning styles and ï¿½multiple intelligencesï¿½ for learning is a relatively new approach. This approach is one that educators have only recently started to recognize. Traditional schooling used (and continues to use) mainly linguistic and logical teaching methods. It also uses a limited range of learning and teaching techniques. Many schools still rely on classroom and book-based teaching, much repetition, and pressured exams for reinforcement and review. A result is that we often label those who use these learning styles and techniques as ï¿½bright.ï¿½ Those who use less favored learning styles often find themselves in lower classes, with various not-so-complimentary labels and sometimes lower quality teaching. This can create positive and negative spirals that reinforce the belief that one is "smart" or "dumb".

By recognizing and understanding your own learning styles, you can use techniques better suited to you. This improves the speed and quality of your learning.

The Seven Learning Styles

Visual (spatial):You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.

Aural (auditory-musical): You prefer using sound and music.

Verbal (linguistic): You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.

Physical (kinesthetic): You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.

Logical (mathematical): You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.

Social (interpersonal): You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.

Solitary (intrapersonal): You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

Why Learning Styles? Understand the basis of learning styles

Your learning styles have more influence than you may realize. Your preferred styles guide the way you learn. They also change the way you internally represent experiences, the way you recall information, and even the words you choose. We explore more of these features in this chapter.

Research shows us that each learning style uses different parts of the brain. By involving more of the brain during learning, we remember more of what we learn. Researchers using brain-imaging technologies have been able to find out the key areas of the brain responsible for each learning style.

For example:

Visual: The occipital lobes at the back of the brain manage the visual sense. Both the occipital and parietal lobes manage spatial orientation.

Aural: The temporal lobes handle aural content. The right temporal lobe is especially important for music.

Verbal: The temporal and frontal lobes, especially two specialized areas called Brocaï¿½s and Wernickeï¿½s areas (in the left hemisphere of these two lobes).

Physical: The cerebellum and the motor cortex (at the back of the frontal lobe) handle much of our physical movement.

Logical: The parietal lobes, especially the left side, drive our logical thinking.

Social: The frontal and temporal lobes handle much of our social activities. The limbic system (not shown apart from the hippocampus) also influences both the social and solitary styles. The limbic system has a lot to do with emotions, moods and aggression.

Solitary: The frontal and parietal lobes, and the limbic system, are also active with this style.

Where to next?

Click the links in the navigation menu on the left (or above) to learn more about the individual learning styles, or go to the learning styles inventory page to try a test to discover your own learning styles.

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Module 2 - Developing & Managing the Adult Learning Community 

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Module 2 - Developing & Managing the Adult Learning Community 

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Creating an Effective Learning Environment

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Take a moment to think back to your time as a student and recall some of your favorite courses. Very likely, those courses well organized, assignments were clear, lectures and classroom discussions were focused and interesting, and the professor conveyed a compassion for teaching. How can you create such an environment in your own courses? Consider these techniques:
Begin to establish an effective environment on the first day of class:

Introduce yourself. Explicitly state the way you would like to be addressed.

Consider offering an ice breaker to relax students and encourage interaction.

Teach something; immediately begin to engage students in the course.

Take class time to review the syllabus and emphasize important aspects. In fact, use the syllabus to begin building student engagement even before you meet with students by ensuring that it articulates learning outcomes, class format, and expected behavior. During those first few hectic add/drop weeks, students appreciate an instructor who clearly and concisely presents a course overview.

Expect some students to come in late. They're getting lost, too!

Consider setting community rules (e.g., regarding phones, laptops, talking, sleeping, eating, late arrivals, and early departures) with the students ; they will appreciate the democratic approach.

Interact with students right away: Learn names; anonymity discourages student engagement. Using props (name cards, photos, index cards), taking attendance, and handing back papers and homework can help you to connect a name with a face.

Be prepared to respond to challenges: See " Classroom Management " for details.

Engage, Engage, Engage: Don't let down once the course gets underway. Continue to focus on the following strategies:

Arouse students' curiosity

Convey your passion for the subject

Make course material relevant

Assign challenging but achievable tasks

Give students some control over their learning

Be available to meet students before and after class and during office hours

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Creating an Effective Learning Environment

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Take a moment to think back to your time as a student and recall some of your favorite courses. Very likely, those courses well organized, assignments were clear, lectures and classroom discussions were focused and interesting, and the professor conveyed a compassion for teaching. How can you create such an environment in your own courses?

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Module 3 - Creating an Active Learning Environment 

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Module 3 - Creating an Active Learning Environment 

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Inside an Active Learning Classroom

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The new Science Teaching and Student Services building at the University of Minnesota will have 10 Active Learning Classrooms. Active Learning Classrooms allow for students to experience a more interactive and conversational educational environment. With round tables for discussion and high-tech accessories for interactivity, these classrooms will service more than 125 class sections this fall.

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Engaging Your Audience

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How to Give an Awesome (PowerPoint) Presentation (Whiteboard Animation Explainer Video).

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Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)

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Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning

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How Can I Tell What My Students Are Thinking?

There are several ways to answer this important question. A general answer is that students often have enough time on their hands, even as they sit in class and listen, to think about several things at the same time. None of us puts 100 percent of our attention to a lecture for long periods of time. Instead, attention waxes and wanes.

We also know that students have seven developmental tasks they are working on during the college years: achieving intellectual, physical, and social competence; managing emotions; becoming autonomous; establishing identity; managing interpersonal relationships; clarifying purpose; and developing integrity (Chickering, 1969). At times, students are probably thinking about these other things, rather than about purely intellectual pursuits.

But good teachers will also want to know a more specific answer. In fact, a set of techniques has been developed to get at the question, "What are students thinking?" They are called Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs), and were developed by Angelo and Cross (1993). There are many varied CATs that can be used. The most important things are that they are quick to use, easy to interpret, and provide a wealth of information about our students' thinking, so we can have a better idea of what is going on with our students.

Using a CAT is a little like asking a research question. Is there something you would like to know about your specific students in your specific course? CATs can get at:

What do students come to my course knowing (or thinking they know)?

What are they thinking at any moment in class?

What did they get out of today's class compared to what I wanted them to get?

What are they thinking when they study (or how did they go about answering a problem)?

Why Should I Use CATs?

For instructors, more frequent use of CATs can:

Provide short-term feedback about the day-to-day learning and teaching process at a time when it is still possible to make mid-course corrections.

Provide useful information about student learning with a much lower investment of time compared to tests, papers, and other traditional means of learning assessment.

Help to foster good rapport with students and increase the efficacy of teaching and learning.

Encourage the view that teaching is a formative process that evolves over time with feedback.

For students, more frequent use of CATs can:

Help them become better monitors of their own learning.

Help break down feelings of anonymity, especially in larger courses.

Point out the need to alter study skills.

Provide concrete evidence that the instructor cares about learning.

CATs are feedback devices to help us determine how much, how well, and simply how our students learn. Many faculty on the Bloomington campus use CATS regularly. Make an appointment with one of our consultants to help you identify the question you would like to ask about your students' learning and adapt a CAT to your topic.

Example CATs

References

Angelo, T. A., and Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A handbook for college teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Chickering, A. (1969). Education and identity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.