This is a story about one of my most anticipated lessons I ever created. I have organised this post in three parts: The story, The Teaching Techniques and The Supporting Tools
At the beginning of the academic year I asked my students what topics they might be intrested in to have incorporated in the Start-up Strategy course I am teaching at Karel De Grote University college. One of the topics that popped up was ‘Networking’. I did not consider myself a Networking expert. I mean, I am capable of connecting with people however I never thought about the mechanics behind it let alone teaching about the subject.
The only thing I knew is that I hated the “here is my business card handshake and call me if you need me for …”
In hindsight my limited capabilities on the subject may have served as a creative constraint. It surely pushed me in my search of getting creative with the topic. I was thinking it would be impossible to teach valuable lessons on the topic of networking inside a classroom. So I started thinking on how could I get students out of the classroom and keep them on a learning journey. I can’t recall the exact inspiration however to dub it ‘the night of the museum’. Although I remember a childhood picture of me and a friend holding strange telephone like apparatus to our ears in the open air museum in Orange France.
This idea of people are running around with some kind of telephone or their smartphones close to their ears, while they are looking at pieces of art and listen to the explanation seemed like a valid way to transfer the knowledge. I figured this could also be an interesting technique to use during a lesson. I’ll be fully honest here. The idea of the Night at the museum became a reality because for this lesson I did not feel like i was capable of explaining a it in a decent matter.
So you could say that I created one of my most anticipated lessons by students out of laziness. However I believe that in the toughest of situations e.g. playing an unplayable piano, true creativity pops up. In the hindsight it was probably a lot tougher than preparing “a normal lesson” yet I wouln’’t have learned as much as I did and I guess the same could be said for my students.
For most courses I design I start with building up a 4C Map, another of those Training From the Back of the Room takeaways. All tough I have a digital template available for me starting from a blank piece of paper works best to create a 4C map.
Where do you stand?
I invited every one to join me in the corridor where I had placed two A4 cards: Not quite yet -> I am confident
I then asked the students ‘ where do you stand in regards to your confidence on networking’
For this part of the lesson I designed the actual ‘Night at the Museum’ format which was in fact a Treasure hunt or Scavenger hunt, if you will.
The idea was to have several of my visual drawings spread out in the corridor of our school building and to link them up with a QR code. So that If a student was able to find the visual he or she could scan the QR code and immediately could listen to the explanation and link it with the drawing.
So before the class I watched a lot of videos and for each of these snippets i created a corresponding visual that would highlight or help highlight the main topics that the speakers would talk about.
The idea was that just before the start of the lesson I could actually hide them in plain sight in in the corridors of the University College that I’m teaching.
The instruction for the students was as follows: “In the corridor of the second floor I have paired several of my drawings with a QR code. It is up to you to go out and find them, scan the code, watch, listen and learn. You have 25 minutes to find them all and the first person back in the room who had found them all receives a cookie”.
For this I had set up Three Competence centers or Islands of knowledge as we called them during our lesson.
The idea was that the group of students would divide them self in different groups of 5 people and that they took a seat at one of the islands. for bigger groups you can duplicate the competence centers in groups of three and create an carousel among them.
On each island a different task awaited the students for which they each got 10 minutes. At the end of this time frame they have to move to the next table. Because movement trumps sitting.
The idea here was to do a reflection and discussion among the students to learn from each others what their main takeaways were from the night at the museum part. The end goal of this was to create a flip chart with tips and Visualizations that summarize the best guidelines for gaining more confidence in networking. With bigger groups, in a second iteration, i had two groups doing this competence center at the same time. By letting two groups create a flip chart this added some competition because we did a voting session for best visual by the whole group at the end .
All students of the group received a self-correcting worksheet the was based on the topics of the different videos they had been looking for during the Night of the museum exercise. In essence this is a fill in the blanks exercise with a list of words at the bottom that could be used. In a different envelope the also received the solution. The idea here is that as a group they try and come up with the solution on their own by discussion possibilities. When they were done they can decide for themselves to check the solution and celebrate the result.
I loaned the name of a Liberating Structure however it wasn’t a pure Impromptu networking session. In the classroom I had 5 Qr codes on the table. I created these QR codes based on the MS Teams meeting URL . Students where instructed to take their headphones out and scan the QR code, all else was up to them. Most students expected a video and were surprised they ended up in a meeting.
As a preparation for this lesson I had Send out a request on Linkedin to recruit volunteers for a networking task. Basically I asked people to fill in a form to check availability. ( if you would like to help next academic year, fill in this form). The main goal here was to find people and to have their email address to organise two teams meetings: a short briefing and one during class time for my students to jump into. In the end I was able to arrange five volunteers to be present and waiting inside this Teams meeting. So that Students would immediately had to practice their Networking learning with a random stranger. If you cannot find enough volunteers you can also match up students in a teams meeting with one another by adding a duplicate QR code linking to the same Ms Teams Meeting.
To finish this class we did two things: we started by forming a circle and did a ball toss. The idea was to share lessons learned during this class when you had the ball.
when this was done. once again, I invited every one to join me in the corridor where I had placed two A4 cards: “Not quite yet” -> “I am confident” and we did a ‘Where do you stand?’
I asked them how they would scale themselves along the presented continuum. I noticed quite some people moving towards into the direction of “I am confident”.
To allow this lesson to be a success I used some basic office software to ease the process.
To organise the Night of the Museum part of the lesson I looked for Different Recordings from people talking about the same topic: Networking. In most cases, these were TED talks. I selected about six of them. A TED talk is about fifteen to twenty minutes so I used a snipping tool to snip out what to me seemed like the most interesting parts. The snipping tool I used is Clip champ. Aiming at around max Five minutes for each video. So that my students, when they saw one of the pieces of art and looked at the video, they didn’t have to listen to the whole talk because this would take up to much time.
Once the snippets were created I first uploaded these videos on the M365 video platform streams. In a second iteration I switched to Loom because this was easier to access the videos due to some log in issues students had in the first iteration with their Office tenant.
For each of these video snippets I created a QR code that students could scan with their phones and would lead them directly to the link of that video. For the creating the QR codes I use a MS Word add-in called: ‘QR4office’ . Yes there are a lot of free websites that also offer this, yet sometimes they manipulate your QR code so that people scanning the code end up on a different URL. During the tryouts this happened a couple of times so I looked for an alternative. The reasoning behind the QR codes was that I would paste a Qr code next to all my sketches as you sometimes see in a museum. You walk to a piece of art, you scan the qr code for more info.
To avoid chaos and getting everybody back in time I created two small Power Automate Flows and a Registration from. So that I could instant message all students that actually joined the lesson.
In short I created a Ms Form for them to fill in. This is easy to share with them via a QR code as well. From this form I created a supporting automated Power automate flow that would merge all students on a SharePoint list with their office 365 credentials
Again I added in a branch because I also wanted to experiment with sending out small yes/no survey during the exercise.
This flow I could trigger this via the power automate app from my smartphone.
I choose this way because this would allow me to only send messages to students that were present in class and that scanned the registration form and I used to create power automate flows for customers. It’s neat feature if all users are on the same office tenant.
For public trainings I would just set up a group conversation in Whatsapp and share the link on screen and ask to return to the classroom in that group chat.
For the competence center ‘impromptu Networking’
I created five MS Teams meetings. In the classroom I had 5 Qr codes on the table. I created these QR codes based on the MS Teams meeting url . In the back end I had arranged five volunteers to be present and waiting inside this MS Teams meetings. The volunteers received the invite via email. In this way it was possible for multiple students to join the same meeting where they had to practice their learnings with a “random stranger”.
At the beginning of the academic year I asked students about topics they would be interested in to add to the Start-Up Strategy curriculum. One of the topics that came out of the hat was ‘Networking’. This topic was a little bit out of my comfort zone and out of my basic teaching bag which pushed me to be creative with how to bring the topic forward. I tried bringing in some technology hacks into my basic lesson set up to explore the ins and out of networking and moved myself as teacher to a facilitator role in designing this class. In review I am very happy with the result and I learned a lot about networking in the process.
© All Rights Reserved.
