INTERACTIVE TECHNIQUES FOR LEARNING (eBook)

Esther Richter, Matthew Richter, Sivasailam Thiagarajan (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
548 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-89412-736-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Everyone is sold on the need to 'engage' learners through the learning process. But, many think just playing games, having fun, and ensuring participants have a great time translates into effective learning. There's more to it than that! For decades now Thiagi has shown us how to use instructional games and simulations to facilitate learning. Interactive Techniques for Learning is the culmination of that work, in partnership with his long-time disciple and business partner, Matt Richter. Together, with Esther Richter, they provide the processes and methods that enable Thiagi's activities to work. They explore: 1. An overview of the learning process and how it happens. 2. What instructional games and simulations are and how to use them effectively 3. How to create more intrinsically motivating learning environments 4. How to choose which activity to use 5. ?How to debrief an activity 6. How to evaluate both the activity and the overall learning program 7. ?Conducting and modifying activities 8. Their instructional design principles and procedures 9. ?The differences between training, facilitation, and facilitative training 10. And more Then, as one might expect from the man himself, you get 60 activity protocols categorized into 11 different interactive strategies. Some are oldies, but goodies, updated for the 21st century. Others are brand spanking new.

Esther Richter is Head of Operations at the Learning Development Accelerator. Also a trainer of trainers and a facilitator, Esther has been practicing Thiagi's activities for eight years in France and the United States. After obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, she will begin a Master's degree in Public Health at SUNY Albany in 2024.

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This book is for trainers, educators, professors, instructional designers, learning leaders, facilitators, coaches, manager who want to engage their teams, and anyone interested in using activities to facilitate learning. The book is divided into three parts. PART ONE. THE WHAT AND WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO. The authors give you a bit about the Thiagi way of doing things. They provide the framework for how they approach activities and the facilitation of activities. They even give an overview of the science of learning as an opening salvo since learning is the purpose of what they do in the first place. Some of the content will be familiar but updated, given their own latest experiences and the current research out there. Some will be new to readers of their work but hopefully as useful as the previous material.?PART TWO. THE HOW TO DO WHAT WE DO. In this section, the authors really get into the mechanics. How they do instructional design. How they organize their activities. How they choose which activity to use. How to debrief an activity. How to evaluate whether an activity worked, and so forth. PART THREE. THE ACTIVITIES. The authors provide eleven chapters on different interactive strategies. Each contains three to six activities, a total of sixty for the book. These are the eleven they tend to use the most, and they're the author's favorites.?The book is a major update of previous books and articles. No Thiagi book has put together both the theory, the mechanics, and the protocols all in one place since the 1990s. Think of this book as the official and most up-to-date Thiagi book.

Textauszug

1

WHAT IS LEARNING

Domain Specific

Very few things we learn as humans would we learn without external support and design (Sweller, 1998). A kid will learn eventually, without guidance, how to walk, how to hold hands, and even talk. These are examples of what is called biologically or evolutionarily primary knowledge (Geary, 2008; Sweller, 2016). They are acquired via generic cognitive skills such as trial-and-error and other weak problem-solving strategies. In other words, humans have evolved to develop these skills without having conscious thought or needing formal instruction. Those skills are transferable to different contexts.

But, in our society, we have many other areas that are not evolutionally natural to learn. These are what are known as cultural artifacts, such as reading, writing, mathematics, history, music… management, nuclear physics, selling, coding, surgery, etc. These are what is known as biologically or evolutionarily secondary knowledge, and they constitute domain-specific concepts and skills (Sweller, 2016). Secondary knowledge is where schools, universities, corporate training, and other learning institutions spend most of their time.

In each of these different domains, there are common and generalized complex skills. For example, in math, music, management, and nuclear physics, one must be adept at thinking critically. Unfortunately, however, a good critical thinker in the music domain cannot transfer that complex skill to the domain of nuclear physics without first having more than a base, foundational level of knowledge about nuclear physics. Why? Because critical thinking requires thinking critically about something, and that is domain knowledge, which is required as one applies good critical thinking. Without that knowledge, one cannot analyze the situation, recognize patterns within systems, take note of already proven solutions, extrapolate to creative solutions, and so forth (LDA Podcast with Kirschner, 2024). The mechanics of critical thinking may be similar, but the application is impossible without some level of expertise.

The same can be seen in medicine. Matt’s father was a rheumatologist. He was renowned as one of the top diagnosticians in his field. He dealt with the diagnosis (detection) and treatment of musculoskeletal disease and systemic autoimmune conditions. But, while he had the basic fundamental training to understand anatomy, physiology, and neurobiology, he was not the one you wanted doing surgery on your brain. He was literally not a brain surgeon. The knowledge and skills are different—even within the same higher-order domain of medicine.

He might learn faster than you might if he wanted to become a brain surgeon. However, being able to diagnose in the field of rheumatology did not train him to think critically about brain trauma problems.

When we teach, we need to teach within the context of how the learner will later apply that knowledge. It intuitively feels as though skills—or even complex skills, like critical thinking, leadership, or even how to have difficult conversations—can be transferrable to different contexts, but they are not. Another example is a manager who is excellent at facilitating conflict or delivering bad news to team members in a business environment (domain). Take her out of that domain and ask her to deliver bad news to a patient newly identified with Stage Four cancer, and that manager will flounder.

Processes may be the same, but knowledge is made up of more than just processes. There are the facts and information of the domain. The doctor delivering news that they are terminally ill with no possibility of cure to a patient must use the vocabulary involved in the sickness and the treatment and must also have a base knowledge of medicine to answer any questions the patient might have. There are concepts like fatal and terminal and palliative that need to be used. The doctor must also understand the statistics and probabilities of what the diagnosis means. Sure, we can provide a general process, but the learners must apply that process and practice using the domain-specific knowledge to get good at it.

That’s why most learning that we teach requires us to be domain-specific. What we teach isn’t something naturally learned, or we L&D pros wouldn’t be needed, AND there’s more to what one needs to learn than simply a general process or a procedure.

Cognitive Load

Simply put, cognitive load refers to how much room you have in your working memory. Each of us, based on what we already have learned, what we are trying to learn, and the environmental impact on us as we learn to have the capacity to focus—use our working memory. Though, we only have so much space in there! At some point, we can blow past our capacity, and the learning process fails.

Sweller identified different types of cognitive load. Intrinsic cognitive load is inherent to the learning task itself, or, said differently, how challenging the task is on its own. Climbing six flights of stairs because there is no elevator is intrinsic to getting to your apartment on the 6th floor. Intrinsic load is determined by the number of information elements that need to be processed while carrying out the task (e.g., 90 steps), along with the interactions between those information elements (e.g., the height of the steps).

An example of a noncomplex (i.e., simple) task is learning the translation of a list of words in one language into another language. It is made up of a few elements, and there’s no interaction between them. The translation of dog or rabbit into Dutch does not influence each other. Speaking or writing even simple sentences in a foreign language is much more complex. Nouns of different genders use different articles. Adjectives also change according to the gender of the noun as well as the quantity of the noun, and so forth.

In this sense, it’s less complex to learn the translations of ten animal names than to correctly write simple sentences using one animal (the rabbit = het konijn / the dog = de hond / a white rabbit = een wit konijn / a white dog = een witte hond; the white rabbit = het witte konijn / the white dog = de witte hond / etc.).

Communicating is more complex and thus requires more working memory and causes more intrinsic load than translating. This is only influenced by the learner’s expertise. The more you know the foreign language or the better trained you are when it comes to climbing stairs, the lower the intrinsic load of learning it / getting to your apartment.

Extraneous cognitive load is the mental effort added by the instructional techniques used. Some instructional techniques add very little extra load (e.g., goal-free tasks, worked-out and partially worked-out examples, modeling). In contrast, others add quite a bit (e.g., inquiry learning, discovery learning, realistic math). Being required to climb the stairs one step at a time at your own pace is less effortful than taking it three steps at a time within a certain time limit. Also, the level of distraction, irrelevant activity, confusing information, overcomplicated exercises, etc., applied by the trainer, teacher, activity, or other external factors add a load that isn’t helpful for (i.e., isn’t germane to) learning. In other words, if the process of learning—the instruction—is too complex, we get distracted and overwhelmed. Learning effectiveness is reduced. The external mechanism for learning the information must be appropriate for the lesson.

In general, we want to carefully control intrinsic load, and minimize extraneous load. When we automate content, we reduce intrinsic load and allow our capabilities to expand. Then we can handle more complexities or learn to perform under extraneous load.

Cognitive load is a vital consideration. It is something we need to be always conscious of from design through delivery through application back on the job. It is the base filter we should use as we determine when and how to modify what we do in the classroom.

Objective Goal for Competence

One of the reasons learning objectives are important is they set the target for what we expect the learner to be able to do as a result of the lesson. If we are teaching a child how to add 2+2, the objective centers around very basic arithmetic. If the goal is driving a car, we distinguish between driving around town safely and driving in Formula 1 (a professional race requiring extremely high levels of driving mastery).

A teenager learning to drive will be expected to:

1. Not get hurt.
2. Not hurt anyone else.
3. Not damage the car.
4. Not break the law.
5. Get where they need to go.
6. Get there smoothly.

The race car driver will have a different set of objectives, including managing high speeds, quick turns, distance management at those high...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.9.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• ISBN-13: 979-8-89412-736-1 / 9798894127361