6 hours Ago By MAYUR KALBAG
Its said that in today’s world we must not use yesterday’s methods to achieve tomorrow’s success. Therefore, through this column I wish to share four useful, practical and pleasantly unconventional ways or techniques to help make the art of teaching as well as training most interesting and impacting for the students and the participants of any training session. Role plays I HAVE seen many professors teach with a lot of emphasis on lecturing.
Once they start speaking about a topic they keep going on and on and on leaving many students bored and losing their concentration. I have myself experienced this. The subject was market segmentation.
The professor greeted us and then just started lecturing about its different aspects. It was a very interesting topic and something that some of us were keenly looking forward to, but the manner in which he just went on a marathon of lecturing got us bored and we began to get distracted. Whether it is market segmentation or any other topic it is extremely important for a lecturer to implement something called role plays.
What is a role-play? Well, it is about getting students or participants together into smaller groups, giving them real-life scenarios related to the subject and then making them play out those scenarios like a drama or a play. But this is not all. After the role play is completed the students will have to explain what they have learnt from it and what the other spectators could benefit from it.
It is through role plays many aspects about the subject can emerge and once that is done the lecturer can then share his own thoughts and perspectives and add tremendous value to the entire teaching session. I must assert here that I am not at all against the act and art of delivering lectures, but am more keen that it is beautifully combined with interactive activities, such as role plays. Audio visual initiatives There was this particular university lecture where we were shown a video about a vegetable market.
What was most amazing about it was that despite the large number of vegetable vendors and customers, the co-ordination and communication between them was excellent and due to this the customers received the best customer service. The video was for about seven minutes, but that left a major impact on us. After the video was shown to us the lecturer explained about the importance of team-building and the role of interpersonal communication in organisations.
The combination of the video and the lecture taught me a lot and I have not yet forgotten about it. It is for this reason I always insist that lecturers and professors must try to incorporate audio-video inputs especially through short but powerful and positively impacting videos that can also inspire the students to learn about the specific topics more effectively. Go beyond the four walls If not for all the subjects, at least for a few selected or relevant ones, as a lecturer, you must try and take your students outside the classroom.
I have had the fortune of being part of a class where the lecturer asked all of us to go out and sit on the playground. We were immediately excited about it and trotted out with big smiles on our faces. The subject that the lecturer was teaching was human resource management, the atmosphere in which we were taught about it was simply amazing.
There were no walls and the sky was our roof. In many ways, due to the open environment, we too opened up and excitedly shared our ideas and perspectives in more effective ways thereby making the entire process of learning successful. My belief is that, at least sometimes, we must break the monotony of having the lectures in the classrooms.
Make that courageous move and take the students out and you will see that the session will become different and at the same time highly exciting for the student and also the lecturer. Remember, the same can apply for trainings as well, especially those that are related to personality development, Leadership skills, managerial skills development and most importantly, team building. Using pictorials Why use power point slides or ‘PPT’ slides all the time? At times, use pictorials as it creates a healthy level of excitement and curiosity within the minds of the students.
For example, you want to explain something about an engineering design. One way would be to simply explain it through a lecture. The other way would be to show the design through a power point presentation, but there is a third alternative and that is to show the actual design without anything explained.
You will show only the design and encourage the students to create their own inferences from it. This way of extracting perspectives from students can enhance involvement and thereby increase higher receptivity from them. What I have shared with you are a few, but truly innovative and impacting ways to make the process of teaching or training more interesting, not only for the students, but also for the lecturers, professors and trainers.
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