Does your learning environment facilitate the learning process?
Some examples of influences include:
Room Layout – What sort of class will be run, in teams or in a traditional classroom layout? And does it change during the class, or change through feedback from students?
Seating Layout – How do we want the students to interact? Similar to above however horse shoe shaped layouts versus front facing seating versus groups may impact on the learning environment.
Lighting – Ensure sufficient light is available, natural light versus indoor lighting may influence the learning process.
Room Temperature – If is too warm or cold students will be unable to concentrate.
Visual stimulation – use of PowerPoint’s, whiteboards, butcher paper, video/DVDs and props where necessary online programs and sessions, blogs and wiki become more available for use in education.
Aural stimulation – use of music and variation of tone in delivery, projection of voice and external noise impacts the class concentration.
Support materials available – handouts, learner guides, tutorials, textbooks, simulated environments.
Classroom participation – students need to have different interactions with each other as well as the trainer to ensure the learning process offers variety to students.
Maintaining attention – similar as above, however some subjects such as taxation and law can be hard to offer fun activities. Trainers should ensure that they find ways to make a subject interesting and fun with variety to captivate and motivate students.
Class size and dynamics – influence the learning environment too many can cause lack of attention to certain students and too little can make the class dull and uninteresting. At our college we ensure we have a mix of student nationalities and male and female students to try to offer a dynamic learning environment.
Below are links to two interesting articles I noticed recently and next week I will add some PowerPoint presentations that my colleague has created.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/05/attention-how-it-works-how-it-fails-and-how-to-improve-it.php
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