Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Chapters 10: Content Delivery

Chapter 10 is the last of the chapters that contain exercises, so I'll dedicate a separate post to it before discussing the (very brief) final two chapters.

Mendes draws a strange parallel to the discussion and the activities that follow in this chapter. He mentions how sometimes we get behind schedule and, as a result,  conduct a large data dump of information to make sure everything gets covered. 

I've been in this situation,  and in the beginning,  I'd try shortcuts,  but eventually I learned that it didn't matter if I got through the information. It mattered that I provided information in the most understandable form possible. 

Mendes' approach though, is to make group projects out of it. But I don't see how that is a time saver. They are merely group projects. There is certainly something to be said about allowing learners to teach and Mendes provides 5 exercises that do just that. A couple of these are fairly pedestrian; for example,  doing a group presentation or breaking of into teams/duos to go over what's been discussed. One that stood out was providing a piece of information to each group such that once the groups each share their information,  the entire group gets the big picture. 

That said,  it doesn't resolve the issue at hand mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. I think exercises that encourage interaction should be a staple of being a facilitator though. 

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