Transcript:
Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with colleagues. If you think it would be of interest to them. So, today I want to talk a little bit about why it’s important to plan your sessions. This is particularly pertinent if you’re delivering a stand-up lecture, that’s expected to keep students engaged for 40 minutes, 45 minutes, but even in a normal session, a normal seminar session, it’s still really important that you plan. Down your session. It’s really important that you don’t plan around the content. And rather you plan around the learning experiences. We can almost take them as synonyms. We would almost say content and experiences are the same, but it’s really important that you think about how the student is hearing that content, how they’re engaging with that content rather than just delivering them raw content.
I think it’s also really important as you plan out those linkages, those connections between the experiences in your lecture, that you don’t use a hundred percent of the time, certainly lecturers when they start their careers, if they’re not particularly confident, they will walk into a lecture theater, start delivering, keep talking and leave at the end, in order to possibly avoid confrontation, avoid questions.
And once you’ve found your feet, you will be able to use the time really effectively. And I think it’s important that you plan possibly for up to 80% of the session to be around the learning experiences, the guided experiences that you were expecting to share with students, and leave 20%. at the end. Sometimes people say, what do I do if people don’t have questions, if students don’t ask anything, how do I use that time?
There, there are a number of ways that you can use that, but it is important to have a, almost an Encore in the way that a musician is expecting to come back onto the stage and perform again. we don’t usually get, rounds of standing ovations for our teaching, but very often having an Encore is really important.
It’s almost the most important thing because it’s the last thing that the student is going to experience. So it can’t be something that is core. Can’t be core content or core content experience because you might not get your opportunity. The session might go long and it’s dangerous to leave the best to the end, but it has to be something that’s reinforcing something that’s empowering and it’s worth actually concentrating really on what that Encore is going to look like.
And then build the session back. If the session does go a little bit long, that Encore needs to be able to be prepared either as a short video interaction to go up on the website on your, virtual learning environment, or possibly. Yeah, featuring featured in a handout, but it’s really important that you plan out the experiences for 80% of the session, and link them together, conceptually through good planning.
There are some templates that you can use for planning sessions, a search on the web would find any number of them. I’ve also got one on my website as well. If you do want to access that.
Just give it a go. See how it goes. Let me know. Be well.