In-Workshop Hands-On Activities
- When reviewing activities for an active-learning workshop, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind that can help to ensure that the activities are as engaging & as relevant as possible:
- Active: Learning is not a spectator sport! Get participants engaged in skill development as quickly as possible and for as much time as possible. Lecture for only as long as absolutely necessary to get the hands-on work started.
- Contextual: Just-in-time learning to help participants with immediate problems or learning needs, not just-in-case learning (unless that is what the learner wants).
- Choice: Students should be given as much choice as possible during the workshop, especially, if possible with what they create with the new skills they are learning.
- Differentiated: Allow participants to work at their own pace, and to customize the workshop with a range of activities to accommodate the different skill levels that they bring with them.
- Connect to Prior Knowledge: Connect new skills in the workshop to prior participant knowledge. This is more difficult to do in a one-off workshop, but asking students what discipline they work in and what they hope to get out of the workshop during introductions at the beginning can help.
- Multiple activities often need to be created to cover all of the learning outcomes for the workshop, and can help you differentiate for different skill levels and different participant learning goals.
- For example, an introduction to Excel workshop took five separate activities to cover all of the learning outcomes; however, participants could choose to complete only the activities that were relevant to them.
- Some participants had some experience with Excel, so they could skip ahead to the more advanced activities. For others, creating a Pivot table was an important skill to acquire, while most simply wanted to learn how to use basic functions and create charts and tables from the results.
- Using multiple activities with handouts gives participants choice and the ability to work at their own pace, while having an instructor present to answer questions. Sometimes this form of instruction, when combined with pre-workshop videos or readings, is called flipped learning.
Good job! Time to look at the role of pre-workshop activities to help prepare participants to fully engage in learning activities as quickly as possible.