REQUIRED CONTENT
An effective technique for adding interactivity to a lecture involves requiring participants to review what they heard and summarize the key points. Mixed-Up Sentences provides an intriguing twist to this review-and-summary strategy.
Synopsis
Make your lecture presentation. Distribute a handout with seven summary sentences. Ask teams of participants to review this list and cross out an unrelated sentence. Then ask the teams to add additional sentences that are related to the lecture content. Finally, instruct the teams to identify the top two sentences.
Purpose
To recall the key points in a lecture
Participants
Minimum: 1
Maximum: Any number
Best: 15 to 30
Time
14 to 30 minutes for the lecture
15 to 25 minutes for the activity
Handout
List of Summary Sentences (one copy for each participant)
Supplies and Equipment
- Paper and pencil
- Timer
- Whistle
Room Arrangement
Set up chairs around tables to permit teamwork.
Preparation
Think through your presentation with the help of an outline. Write down a set of sentences that summarize the key points. Rearrange these sentences in a random order so that they don’t follow the sequence of your presentation. Remove one of these sentences and substitute another sentence related to the topic but not included in the presentation. Print the seven sentences as a handout.
Flow
Make the lecture presentation. Start with your regular presentation, encouraging participants to take notes.
Organize teams. At the end of your presentation, organize the participants into one to five teams, each with two to seven participants. Explain that team members will share their notes and review the key points from your lecture.
Distribute the summary sentences. Explain that someone prepared this list of summary sentences. These sentences are not arranged in a sequential order. Unfortunately, one of the summary sentences dealing with a key point was accidentally replaced by another sentence that was not a part of the presentation.
Delete the unrelated sentence. Ask the teams to review the summary sentences and identify the one that is not related to your lecture. Instruct the teams to cross out this sentence.
Add missing sentences. Invite the teams to review their notes and compare them to the list of summary sentences. Working as a team, ask the participants to reconstruct the missing summary sentence. Explain that there could be several key points from your presentation that are not in the list of sentences. Encourage teams to add one or two additional sentences to the list. Announce a 3-minute time limit for this activity.
Conduct team presentations. At the end of 3 minutes, blow a whistle and ask teams to quickly complete their task. Then ask each team to read the added sentences. Identify the key elements included in the summary sentences added by the teams. Make suitable clarifications to remove any misconceptions revealed in these sentences.
Identify top two sentences. Ask the participants to review the list of summary sentences once more and identify the two most important sentences. Announce a 3-minute time limit for this task.
Conclude the activity. At the end of 3 minutes, blow your whistle and invite the teams to present their selections. Thank the participants for the contributions to the learning process.
Adjustments and Variations
Not enough time? Ask the participant teams to review the list of summary sentences and remove the unrelated sentence. Assign the other two activities (of adding sentences and identifying two most important sentences) as homework.
Don’t want to lecture repeatedly? Produce an audio or video recording of your lecture and play it back during future sessions.
Play Sample
I frequently conduct a training session on activities-based curriculum design called ABCD. Here are the details of how I use the Mixed-Up Sentences technique in this sesstion.
Lecture
Here’s an edited transcript of the lecture presentation:
For 25 years, I have been conducting a meta-analysis of the research on how people learn. I did this by slogging through different experimental studies and comparing their results.
Based on this secondary analysis, I have created a model for designing and conducting training. I call this model ABCD. This acronym stands for Activities Based Curriculum Design.
The foundation of the ABCD model is a simple principle: Anything you teach, can be taught through an activity. You may think that your training topic does not deserve the time and effort to conduct an activity. But if you have an important topic to teach, and if you take professional pride in being a trainer, I may even amplify this prescription to say anything you teach, should be—must be—taught through an appropriate activity.
Why do I say this? I emphasize activities because of a key principle from my research :
People learn through active participation, not through passive reception.
For example, if you are training people to swim, you should have them actively swim instead of passively listening to the laws of floatation or reading about Archimedes’ principle.
Many laws of learning—many experimental results—support and enhance my emphasis on activities-based learning. Let me talk about three of these laws:
The law of practice and feedback claims that you need to actively practice a new skill in order to master it.
How do you go to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Listen: My name is Sivasailam Thiagarajan. Okay, I have trained you to say my name because like many trainers I equate telling with training.
Now can you say my name?
If you are like most people, you are not able to say my name. That’s because you did not actively practice the new skill.
I’m sure you have heard that practice makes perfect. That’s a lie. At least, it is incorrect. You see, practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. I have many friends who have practiced saying my name hundreds of times, and they still butcher it horribly. They have practiced a wrong way of saying my name and that has become permanent.
So you need to receive feedback from someone to correct your mistakes. For practice and feedback to happen, you need to use activities-based training.
Let me talk about another law of learning that supports—and enhances—activities-based training. The law of contextualized learning claims that in training the context is as important as the content. This means you have to push your participants into the water when you train them how to swim. If you are training people how to work in an emergency room, sooner or later, you have to place them in an emergency room. If you are worried about the costs and the dangers of providing training in the real-world context, you have to at least use a simulation.
Remember, contextualized learning requires training in an authentic context—and training with authentic activities.
Let me move on to another law of learning that bolsters the use of training activities. The law of tacit knowledge points out that important aspects of practical knowledge are often unspoken and implicit. We know many high-school dropouts who have produced amazing results. But if you ask them how did you do it, they are not able explain their secret. This is because they have learned many things by performing the same task repeatedly under different conditions. This type of learning cannot be picked up from books or lectures or demonstrations. It can only be learned by repeatedly participating in activities.
What do these three laws of learning have to tell us about designing and conducting training? It gives us a simple prescription: Design activities, not content.
Let me hasten to add that training requires both content and activities. Content without activities--like what is happening in a death-by-Powerpoint lecture--results in useless knowledge that cognitive scientists call inert knowledge. And activity without content is like roleplaying a headless chicken. Lots of running around but very little useful learning.
Here’s my recommendation for speeding up and streamlining training design. Instead of wasting time to create your own content, use existing content resources.
When I started my career as a training designer, my content was proprietary. I kept it safely hidden and sold it to my clients.
Content is no longer a scarce commodity. It is abundantly available for any training topic. Recently, I found a billion documents (that’s billion with a b) for the google search term “leadership”. Not only that. When I went to Amazon.com and searched for Leadership Training, I found more than 75 thousand books on the topic. Not to mention videos, podcasts, and flash cards. Content is truly abundantly available.
You may be worried that even when you can find all the content you can use, incorporating them in suitable training activities may take a lot of time and require skills that you don’t have. Here’s my secret tip: Use templates to create activities.
Here’s an example: You can distribute a handout and ask the participants to read the content. Later, you can organize them into teams and ask them to solve a crossword puzzle that contains clues related to the important content from the handout.
It’s time for me to walk the talk. I have presented a lot of passive content about activities-based curriculum design. Now I want you to participate in an activity to reinforce this content.
I used a template called Mixed-Up Sentences for creating this training activity. Here’s how it works:
I am going to give you seven summary sentences that identify the important points in my content lecture.
And here’s your task. One of the seven sentences is a fake. It has nothing to do with the content I presented. So your first job is to review the seven summary sentences and to delete the counterfeit sentence.
Handout
Here is the list of summary sentences distributed to the participants:
1. People learn through active participation, not through passive listening or reading.
2. Training activities can be efficiently designed by using appropriate templates.
3. Training content is abundantly available through various resources.
4. Training design is associated with individual courses; curriculum design is associated with a collection of related courses.
5. Training requires harmonious integration of content and activities.
6. We must pay more attention to the design of activities rather than to the design of content.
7. You can—and you must—teach through the use of appropriate activities.
Reuse this Template
You can use the game plan for Mixed Up Sentences as a template for creating an interactive lecture on your own topic.
This technique is particularly useful with training topics that contain a significant number of key points. Here are some sample topics that have been incorporated in Mixed-Up Sentences template:
- Principles of positive psychology
- Handling negative feedback
- Using open-source programs
- Preventing sexual harassment
- Dealing with difficult employees
- Knowledge management