Best practices to build lessons your users enjoy taking
Building effective lessons is a skill that not only helps you teach better, but teaches your learners more effectively. In this article, we’ll talk about four ways you can use Learn to Win to take your teaching strategies to the next level:
- Integrating Checkpoints
- Customizing Answer Feedback
- Using Different Slide Templates
- Using Self-Reflection to Measure the Learning Experience
Integrating Checkpoints
A good lesson includes active learning, which engages learners, rather than having the students just passively read or view the material. By quizzing learners within lessons, teachers ensure their students are reinforcing new knowledge in a low-stakes situation called formative assessment.
Formative assessment aims to improve instruction and student learning while it’s happening. Integrating questions early prepares students for higher-level thinking and applying new knowledge.
A good rule of thumb is adding 1 quizzing slide for every 2-3 content slides or for each key concept. Don’t forget to mix it up-- choose between multiple choice with text answers, multiple choice with image answers, and true/false questions.
These questions aren't graded by the Learn to Win platform because they're just for practice, but you can ensure students are getting the material because students are required to answer the questions correctly before moving on.
Pro tip: You can also integrate questions that students haven’t learned the answer to yet, promoting them to use critical thinking skills and predict an answer.
As a bonus, you can import quizzing templates from lessons into quizzes! That way, you don’t lose the questions you spent time crafting and can quickly create quizzes to further test information taught in lessons.
A Learn to Win quiz is typically a summative assessment meant to evaluate student learning (though they can be formative based on the context). Learn to Win grades quizzes, enabling teachers to gain insight into what their students do and do not know.
Formative vs. Summative Assessment:
Customizing Answer Feedback
Giving feedback on questions, both in lessons and quizzes, helps reinforce learning. For each Learn to Win quizzing template, you can customize three areas of answer feedback:
- Correct answer feedback: use this field to congratulate your learner for choosing the correct answer.
- Incorrect answer feedback: use this field to motivate your learner to keep going, or give a hint.
- General answer feedback: this field appears to all learners, regardless of if the answer is correct or not. This field is the perfect place to reinforce the answer. You might repeat the key phrase from earlier in the lesson, or add additional information on why a certain answer is correct. You may also include guidance on where the student can reference the material or more information about it.
In lessons, where learners must get the questions correct before proceeding, answer feedback helps reinforce teaching points from earlier in the lesson.
Different Slide Templates
Learn to Win comes with content templates, quizzing templates, and game options to provide different ways for your users to interact with content.
Next, we’ll give a few situations and examples in which to use these different templates. These examples are by no means limited; use these as an inspiration for setting up your own lessons specific to your team.
For more information on adding new slides and how to set up these templates, please visit this article for lesson templates and this article for quizzing templates.
Content Slides
- List Slide: showcasing player roles, key points and their descriptions; quick facts with a topic and elaboration
- Bullet Points: giving a lesson overview, highlighting key points to remember before a play; recapping a summary and major takeaways
- Media Upload: uploading game footage; embedding YouTube videos; integrating images with bullet points
- Image Sequencing: presenting a sequence of events; showing a series of images with captions; explaining steps in a procedure
- Image Breakdown: presenting an image and zooming in on different parts; highlighting the roles of different players on the field; examining different parts of a plane
Quizzing Slides
- Multiple Choice Text: selecting the play name when given a signal; choosing the next step in a process; filling in a blank word
- Multiple Choice Image: identifying a play route; selecting the correct part of an engine
- True/False: quick knowledge check with a timer to see if the learner is paying attention
- Free Response (only in quizzes): elaborating on a previous answer; predicting an outcome; explaining what you would do in a given situation
- Drawing Response (only in quizzes): drawing a football play; identifying a part of an object; matching answers
Using the Confidence Check Tool in a Quiz
Note: The confidence check is only a feature in the quizzes, not in quiz questions within the lessons.
Turn on the confidence check by clicking the check-box at the bottom of each quiz slide template. We recommend always having that feature turned on. Checking in is a great way to measure growth and do some-self reflection!
Checking In With Your Learners
Checking in with your learners at the end of teaching and quizzing is a great way to measure learning growth. Additionally, collecting self-reported results from a learner group beyond lesson completion or quiz scores gives learners an opportunity to share their confidence with the material.
Using a free response slide template in quizzes, ask questions like:
- How confident do you feel with this subject material?
- Could you explain this material in your own words?
- Do you feel more confident in your knowledge of the content after taking these lessons?
Measuring confidence in a specific learning objective before and after teaching the material can also be done by creating a pre-quiz, teaching lessons, and then a post-quiz.