Effective and engaging training harmoniously integrates valid content and valuable activities.

In the interactive lecture technique, we require the participants to review the content they heard in a presentation and summarize the key points. This approach improves recall. Mixed-Up Sentences provides an intriguing twist to the review-and-summary strategy.

Synopsis

Present your lecture on the training content. Distribute a handout with seven summary sentences. Ask teams of participants to review this list and cross out an unrelated sentence. Then ask the teams to add additional sentences that are related to the lecture content. Finally, instruct the teams to identify the top two sentences.

Purpose

To recall the key points in a lecture.

Participants

Minimum: 1
Maximum: Any number
Best: 15 to 30

Time

15 to 30 minutes for the lecture
15 to 25 minutes for the activity

Handout

List of Summary Sentences (one copy for each participant)

Supplies and Equipment

Paper and pencil
Timer
Whistle

Room Arrangement

Set up chairs around tables to permit teamwork.

Preparation

Think through your presentation with the help of an outline. Write down a set of sentences that summarize the key points. Rearrange these sentences in a random order so that they don’t follow the sequence of your presentation. Remove one of these sentences and substitute another sentence related to the topic but not included in the presentation. Print the seven sentences as a handout.

Flow

Make the lecture presentation. Start with your regular presentation, encouraging participants to take notes.
Organize teams. At the end of your presentation, organize the participants into one to five teams, each with two to seven participants. Explain that team members will share their notes and review the key points from your lecture.

Distribute the summary sentences. Explain that someone prepared this list of summary sentences. These sentences are not arranged in a sequential order. Unfortunately, one of the summary sentences dealing with a key point was accidentally replaced by another sentence that was not a part of your presentation.
Delete the unrelated sentence. Ask the teams to review the summary sentences and identify the one that is not related to your lecture. Instruct the teams to cross out this sentence.

Add missing sentences. Invite the teams to review their notes and compare them to the list of summary sentences. Working as a team, ask the participants to reconstruct the missing summary sentence. Explain that there could be several key points from your presentation that are not in the list of sentences. Encourage teams to add one or two additional sentences to the list. Announce a 3-minute time limit for this activity.
Conduct team presentations. At the end of 3 minutes, blow a whistle and ask teams to quickly complete their task. Then ask each team to read the added sentences. Identify the key elements included in the summary sentences added by the teams. Make suitable clarifications to remove any misconceptions revealed in these sentences.

Identify top two sentences. Ask the participants to review the list of summary sentences once more and identify the two most important sentences. Announce a 3-minute time limit for this task.

Conclude the activity. At the end of 3 minutes, blow your whistle and invite the teams to present their selections. Thank the participants for the contributions to the learning process.

Adjustments and Variations

Not enough time? Ask the participant teams to review the list of summary sentences and remove the unrelated sentence. Assign the other two activities (of adding sentences and identifying two most important sentences) as homework.

Don’t want to lecture repeatedly? Produce an audio or video recording of your lecture and play it back during future sessions.

Play Sample

I frequently conduct a training session on activities-based curriculum design called ABCD. Here are the details of how I use the Mixed-Up Sentences technique in this session.

Lecture

Here’s an edited transcript of the lecture presentation:

For 25 years, I have been conducting a meta-analysis of the research on how people learn. I did this by slogging through different experimental studies and comparing their results.

Based on this secondary analysis, I have created a model for designing and conducting training. I call this model ABCD. This acronym stands for Activities Based Curriculum Design.

The foundation of the ABCD model is a simple principle: Anything you teach, can be taught through an activity. You may think that your training topic does not deserve the time and effort to conduct an activity. But if you have an important topic to teach, and if you take professional pride in being a trainer, I may even amplify this prescription to say anything you teach, should be—must be—taught through an appropriate activity.

Why do I say this? I emphasize activities because of a key principle from my research : People learn through active participation, not through passive reception.

For example, if you are training people to swim, you should have them actively swim instead of passively listening to the laws of floatation or reading about Archimedes’ principle.

Many laws of learning—many experimental results—support and enhance my emphasis on activities-based learning. Let me talk about three of these laws:

The law of practice and feedback claims that you need to actively practice a new skill in order to master it.
How do you go to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.

Listen: My name is Sivasailam Thiagarajan. Okay, I have trained you to say my name because like many trainers I equate telling with training.

Now can you say my name?

If you are like most people, you are not able to say my name. That’s because you did not actively practice the new skill.

I’m sure you have heard that practice makes perfect. That’s a lie. At least, it is incorrect. You see, practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. I have many friends who have practiced saying my name hundreds of times, and they still butcher it horribly. They have practiced a wrong way of saying my name and that has become permanent.

So you need to receive feedback from someone to correct your mistakes. For practice and feedback to happen, you need to use activities-based training.

Let me talk about another law of learning that supports—and enhances—activities-based training. The law of contextualized learning claims that in training the context is as important as the content. This means you have to push your participants into the water when you train them how to swim. If you are training people how to work in an emergency room, sooner or later, you have to place them in an emergency room. If you are worried about the costs and the dangers of providing training in the real-world context, you have to at least use a simulation.

Remember, contextualized learning requires training in an authentic context—and training with authentic activities.

Let me move on to another law of learning that bolsters the use of training activities. The law of tacit knowledge points out that important aspects of practical knowledge are often unspoken and implicit. We know many high-school dropouts who have produced amazing results. But if you ask them how did you do it, they are not able explain their secret. This is because they have learned many things by performing the same task repeatedly under different conditions. This type of learning cannot be picked up from books or lectures or demonstrations. It can only be learned by repeatedly participating in activities.

What do these three laws of learning have to tell us about designing and conducting training? It gives us a simple prescription: Design activities, not content.

Let me hasten to add that training requires both content and activities. Content without activities--like what is happening in a death-by-Powerpoint lecture--results in useless knowledge that cognitive scientists call inert knowledge. And activity without content is like roleplaying a headless chicken. Lots of running around but very little useful learning.

Here’s my recommendation for speeding up and streamlining training design. Instead of wasting time to create your own content, use existing content resources.

When I started my career as a training designer, my content was proprietary. I kept it safely hidden and sold it to my clients.

Content is no longer a scarce commodity. It is abundantly available for any training topic. Recently, I found a billion documents (that’s billion with a b) for the google search term “leadership”. Not only that. When I went to Amazon.com and searched for Leadership Training, I found more than 75 thousand books on the topic. Not to mention videos, podcasts, and flash cards. Content is truly abundantly available.

You may be worried that even when you can find all the content you can use, incorporating them in suitable training activities may take a lot of time and require skills that you don’t have. Here’s my secret tip: Use templates to create activities.

Here’s an example: You can distribute a handout and ask the participants to read the content. Later, you can organize them into teams and ask them to solve a crossword puzzle that contains clues related to the important content from the handout.

It’s time for me to walk the talk. I have presented a lot of passive content about activities-based curriculum design. Now I want you to participate in an activity to reinforce this content.

I used a template called Mixed-Up Sentences for creating this training activity. Here’s how it works:

I am going to give you seven summary sentences that identify the important points in my content lecture.
And here’s your task. One of the seven sentences is a fake. It has nothing to do with the content I presented. So your first job is to review the seven summary sentences and to delete the counterfeit sentence.

Handout

Here is the list of summary sentences distributed to the participants:

1. People learn through active participation, not through passive listening or reading.
2. Training activities can be efficiently designed by using appropriate templates.
3. Training content is abundantly available through various resources.
4. Training design is associated with individual courses; curriculum design is associated with a collection of related courses.
5. Training requires harmonious integration of content and activities.
6. We must pay more attention to the design of activities rather than to the design of content.
7. You can—and you must—teach through the use of appropriate activities.

Reuse this Template

You can use the game plan for Mixed Up Sentences as a template for creating interactive lecture in your own topic.

This technique is particularly useful with training topics that contain a significant number of key points. Here are some sample topics that have been incorporated in Mixed-Up Sentences template:

1. Principles of positive psychology

2. Handling negative feedback

3. Using open-source programs

4. Preventing sexual harassment

5. Dealing with difficult employees

6. Knowledge management

10 Favorite Interactive Lectures

1. BEST SUMMARY

Basic idea. Each participant prepares a summary of the main points at the end of a presentation. Teams of participants switch their summaries and select the best summary from each set.

Application. This lecture game is especially useful for informational or conceptual content.
Sample topics. Introduction to online learning. Types of stories. Fuzzy logic. Conflict-management principles. Surface tension.

Flow. Stop the lecture at appropriate intervals. Ask participants to write a summary of the content presented so far. Organize participants into equal-sized teams. Redistribute summaries from one team to the next one. Ask each team to collaboratively identify the best summary among those given to them—and read it.

2. DYADS AND TRIADS

Basic idea. Participants write closed and open questions and gain points by answering each others’ questions.

Application. This interactive lecture is useful with any type of instructional content.

Sample topics. Interviewing customers. Doing business in France. Nutrition. Time management. Using the Internet. Chemical hazards.

Flow. The activity consists of three parts. During the first part, participants listen to a lecture, taking careful notes. During the second part, each participant writes a closed question on a card. During the next 7 minutes, participants repeatedly pair up and answer each other’s questions, scoring one point for each correct answer. During the third part, each participant writes an open question. During the next 7 minutes, participants repeatedly organize themselves into triads. Two participants answer each question and the person who gave the better response earns a point.

3. GLOSSARY

Basic idea. The presenter identifies a key term related to the training topic. Teams of participants come up with a definition of the term. The presenter collects these definitions, inserts the correct definition among them, and plays a “dictionary”-type guessing game.

Application. The lecture game is particularly suitable for technical content with key concepts and definitions.

Sample topics. Microprocessor design. Java programming basics. Complexity and chaos. Principles of change management. The game of cricket.

Flow. Present a key term related to your training content and ask teams to come up with a real or imaginary definition. Collect the definitions, insert the “official” definition somewhere in this set, read these definitions, and challenge teams to identify the correct one. Use participants’ definitions to identify training needs and make a suitable presentation. Repeat the process with several key terms until you have covered all relevant content.

4. INTERLUDES

Basic idea. The presenter requires participants to accomplish different types of challenges to process the content presented in the lectures.

Application. This lecture game works effectively with any type of content.

Sample topics. Working with the Swiss. Writing a mission statement. Personal marketing. Business writing. Leadership skills.

Flow. Divide the content into different topics. Make a presentation about the first topic. Ask participants to write a summary of the main ideas. After the second presentation, ask participants to identify the most important idea. After the third presentation, ask participants to draw a diagram related to the topic. After the fourth presentation, ask participants to write a song and sing it. Repeat the process with similar interludes after each of the remaining topics.

5. INTERRUPTIONS

Basic idea. Presenter stops the lecture at random intervals and selects a participant. This participant asks a question, makes a comment, or challenges a statement as a way of demonstrating that they have been processing the presentation.

Application. This lecture game is especially useful when the instructional content is informational.

Sample topics. Business partnership in Canada. How to watch a soccer game. Retirement planning. The World Wide Web.

Flow. Set a timer for a random period between 5 and 10 minutes. Make the presentation in your usual style. Stop the presentation when the timer goes off. Announce a 30-second preparation time during which participants review their notes. Select a participant at random. Ask participant to demonstrate his or her understanding of the topic by asking five or more questions, coming up with real or imaginary application examples, presenting a personal action plan, or summarizing the key points. The selected participant should spend at least 30 seconds and not more than 1 minute in their activity. React to the participant's response and then continue with your presentation. Repeat the procedure as needed.

6. MISSING SENTENCE

Basic idea. After the presentation, you give the teams a scrambled set of sentences that summarize your main points. You explain that one of the sentences is missing. Teams review their notes and reconstruct the missing sentence.

Application. This format is best suited for presentations that cover a significant number of key points. This is also useful when participants have sufficient mastery of the language.

Sample topics. Principles of positive psychology. Handling negative feedback. Using open-source programs. Preventing sexual harassment. Dealing with difficult employees. Knowledge management.

Flow. Prepare a set of summary sentences based on the outline for your presentation. Leave out one or more sentences from this list and print it up in a scrambled order. Make your presentation, organize participants into teams, and give them the incomplete list of summary sentences. Ask teams to try to reconstruct the missing summary sentence.

7. PRESS CONFERENCE

Basic idea. Participants organize themselves into teams and write a set of questions on different subtopics. Presenter responds to the questions in a press-conference format.

Application. This lecture game is especially useful when the instructional content is primarily factual or informational.

Sample topics. Marketing in the Pacific Rim. New-hire orientation. Features and functions of new products. Promotion policies.

Flow. Present a short overview of the major topic and identify three or four subtopics. Distribute index cards to participants and ask them to write at least one question on each subtopic. Collect the question cards and divide participant into as many teams as there are subtopics. Give each team the set of questions dealing with a specific subtopic. Ask the team members to organize the questions in a logical order, eliminating any duplicates. After a suitable pause, play the role of an expert and invite one of the teams to grill you for 10 minutes. At the end of this press conference, ask members of each team to review their notes and identify what they consider to be the two most important pieces of information given in your answers. Repeat this activity with the other teams.

8. QUESTION CARDS

Basic idea. After your presentation, ask teams of participants to write 20 short-answer questions based on the content. Collect all questions, shuffle the cards, and conduct a quiz program.

Application. This interactive lecture format is especially useful with factual content. It is suited for participants who are capable of constructing valid short-answer questions. The quiz program part of this activity requires ample time.

Sample topics. The Hispanic culture. Product features and benefits. Drug dosage, interactions, and abuse. Background information about the corporation.

Flow. Make your presentation and stop at 10-minute intervals. Ask teams of participants to write a set of short-answer questions along with answers on individual index cards. Continue with the next part of the presentation. After the last part of the presentation, collect all question cards and shuffle them. Ask each team to send a representative to the front of the room. Conduct a question program using the questions from the cards (avoiding duplicate questions).

9. SHOUTING MATCH

Basic idea. Participants organize themselves into three teams and assume positive, negative, and neutral roles toward a controversial issue. Presenter conducts an informal debate among the teams and adds her own comments.

Application. This lecture game is especially useful with potentially controversial instructional content.
Sample topics. Affirmative action. Gun control. Health insurance. Political correctness. Sexual harassment policies.

Flow. Make an objective presentation to introduce the issue and identify its major elements. Write the issue on a flipchart in the form of a proposition for debate. Form three teams and assign an extremely positive role to one, an extremely negative role to another, and a neutral role to the third. Ask the positive and negative teams to spend 5 minutes making a list of arguments in support of their position. During the same period, ask the neutral team to prepare a 2-column list of both positive and negative arguments. Conduct a debate between the opposing teams. Ask the neutral team to decide which of the other teams did a more credible job. Also ask members of the neutral team to read arguments on their list that both teams missed. Add your comments and correct any major misconceptions by presenting factual information. Conclude with a question-and-answer session.

10. TEAM QUIZ

Basic idea. Presenter does a “data dump” of factual information. Presenter stops the lecture at intervals, allowing teams of participants to come up with questions on the materials covered so far and to conduct a short quiz contest.

Application. This lecture game is especially useful for presenting significant amounts of technical information or conceptual content.

Sample topics. Principles of quantum physics. Compiler construction. The Linux operating system. ISO 9000 standards. Quality award criteria.

Flow. Warn participants that your presentation will be interspersed with quiz contests. Set up a timer for 10 minutes. Make the first segment of your presentation. Stop the presentation when the timer goes off. Organize participants into teams of three to seven members. Ask each team to come up with three or four fact-recall, rote-memory questions and one or two open-ended, divergent questions. After 3 minutes, ask a team to read a fact-recall question and choose an individual from any other team to come up with the answer. Later, choose another team to ask a divergent question and ask a team to give a response. Continue with the next segment of your presentation, building up on the questions and answers from participants. Repeat the quiz sessions as many times as needed.