Preparing your Education Forum Presentation

After your session is approved, discuss the following with your presenters:

Adult Learning Principles

• Adults need to know why they need to learn something. Share the purpose of an activity or its objectives and how it will solve their problems.

• Adults need to build on their experience. Tie their experience to the new material.

• Adults have a need to feel responsible for their learning

• Adults are ready to learn if training solves an immediate problem. Help attendees identify the problem they’ll solve with the training. Scenarios are extremely important for learning. Add examples and problems you know are happening in the real world.

• Adults learn best when motivation comes intrinsically

 Make Your Session Relevant

• Tell stories as you’re teaching – how does the point relate to what is happening in institutions?

• Be mindful of different learning styles – use appropriate visuals as you present

• Break up the information to avoid cognitive overload

• Get everyone involved

• Keep them engaged

 Divide Your Session Time

The most powerful education forum sessions not only impart knowledge but help learners absorb information with attendee participation activities. Therefore, the time should be broken up time effectively with a didactic portion as well as audience participation portion. This may be broken up throughout the session or half and half.

 Audience Participation

There are many ways to engage audience members. They want to engagement. Examples include:

• Small Group: Provides a less formal setting for peer interaction, discussion, and problem-solving.

  • Group work ideas: brainstorming, case studies, role plays, simulations, debates, problem-solving, peer teaching

  • Ask attendees to form groups of 3-4 right there in their current seats

  • Ask groups to consider a question or concept – which needs to be simple and to the point. Add the question to your PowerPoint presentation

  • Ask groups to assign one person as the transcriber and one person as the presenter if you are going to share ideas after their group work

• Analyzing Case Study, Peer Review, Simulation: Provides an actual problem or situation an individual or group has experienced. It effectively provokes controversy and debate on issues for which definite conclusions do not exist.

• Reflection Sheet: Provides an opportunity for the learner to spend time documenting important information while it is still fresh in their mind in a self-check or reflection or discussion groups

• Panel Discussion/Debate: Provide an opportunity for experts or a group of learners to present differing viewpoints on a topic, issue, or problem to other panelists and the audience.

• Question/Answer: Provides an opportunity for faculty to answer specific participant questions and apply ways to implement them in their practice.

• Think, Pair Share: Allows learners to consider points offered by faculty and sharing them in pairs.

• Audience Response: Provides a simultaneous large audience response to faculty questions allowing faculty to choose a person from each response category to discuss the topic. (Not supported by ABA Audio Visual)

• Problem-Based Learning: Providing opportunities to learn through review and discussion or reflection of given problems.

• Hands On Learning – practicing a procedure or process (divide into groups or pairs)