Active Beats Passive

At a glance

Duration	90 minutes. Session 2 of 3, a week after Session 1
Group	4–12 (above ~12, pitches become a gallery walk). One facilitator can get round about 8; beyond that, a co-facilitator
Canvas box	Activities, part 2: what learners do
Running artefact	The same session as last week, now made active
Shape	Do it, then name it. Paper in the room (nonsense words, a card sort, A3 designs); Kahoot and Menti run by you, so participants only need a phone
The ask	”Before next week I will spend 30–40 minutes playing with Menti or Kahoot and make one active learning thing for my session, and bring it.”

Learning outcomes

These are the content’s suggested outcomes. If your cohort’s differ, agree changes at setup.

By the end of the session, participants will have:

1. Identified which strategy (retrieval, spacing, interleaving, elaboration) was at work in activities they have just experienced. (Blorps and Fizzwicks · Spot the strategy)
2. Redesigned ten minutes of their own session so learners do something, using at least one named strategy and fitting its real setting. (Make 10 minutes active)
3. Explained their design in 60 seconds, naming the strategy and why it suits the setting. (Pitches)
4. Written a specific plan to make one active learning thing before next week. (The ask)

Before the session

The deck and printables

The Day 2 deck: 16 slides plus hidden credits, built on the Day 1 template. Tool slides show only the prompt, so they work with Kahoot or Menti shown alongside, or with the paper fallback; the notes say how.

Print before the session:

• Blorps: half the group gets Version A (re-read), half Version B (fold and self-test). Print retest slips for today and Session 3.
• Spot the strategy: one set per table: the five mats (one per A4 page), and the cards cut out and shuffled.

Read back last week’s asks

Look at the photos of the Session 1 cards. Know roughly who planned what, so you can invite people by name.

Build the Kahoot (Session 1 retrieval)

Five or six questions, light in tone:

• How many items can working memory hold at once? (about 4)
• Roughly how many men have some colour-vision deficiency? (about 1 in 12)
• What price was on the MacBook advert?
• Text plus voice: competes or complements?
• Who is this slide for?

Build the Menti tour

Four deliberately silly questions, one per format, so people meet each format as a learner:

• Multiple choice: which of these do you dread most at work?
• 100 points: you have £100m; split it between these options.
• Pin on image: put a dot on a picture. Suggested: “Spot the difference” by Muband, CC BY-SA 3.0 (mask one half in Menti; credit it, and keep the masked version CC BY-SA). Or choose any open picture from Wikimedia Commons or Flickr’s Creative Commons search.
• Ranking: put these in order.

Keep everything free of patient information, and check local information-governance rules before using free-tier tools.

Room and kit

• Session 1 card photos
• Bad-slide pack (again, for anyone who didn’t do the ask)
• Kahoot and Menti loaded, tested on the venue wi-fi (have a phone hotspot)
• Blorps word sheets (A and B) and retest slips (today and Session 3)
• Spot the strategy: mats and a shuffled card set per table
• Computer Task Sheet (for the ask)
• Setting cards: ward corridor, handover, sim room, clinic, teaching room
• A3 paper and pens for designs
• Cards for the ask
• Visible timer

Session flow

0–10 · Show us your slides

• SAY: last week you wrote an ask. Show us. Invite 3–4 people by name (from the card photos): what did you change, and why? Room: one thing that works, one question.
• Not done? ASK: “What got in the way?” Take it as information, not failure. Hand them the bad-slide pack for later.
• WHY: closes the loop the ask opened. Barriers are data about transfer.
• IF SHORT: two examples, not four. Never skip the read-back.

10–20 · Kahoot: Session 1 retrieval

• SAY: phones out. Quick quiz on last week. Don’t explain why yet. Celebrate, don’t dwell.
• WHY: retrieval practice a week later is also spacing (Roediger & Karpicke 2006; Cepeda et al. 2006). They do it before it’s named.
• FALLBACK: read the questions aloud; answers on fingers (1–4).

20–23 · What did you just do?

• ASK: “What did you just do?” Let them name it: remembered it, a week later.
• SAY: that was retrieval, and the week’s gap was spacing. Keep it short: the next 25 minutes show why.

23–30 · Blorps and Fizzwicks

• Hand out the word sheets: half Version A (re-read), half Version B (fold and self-test), alternate seats. Eight nonsense words with silly hospital meanings.
• SAY (deadpan): eight important clinical terms you’ll need later. Three minutes. Follow the instructions on your sheet.
• After 3 minutes: sheets face down and collected. Don’t say there’ll be a test.
• WHY: a nod to Ebbinghaus’s nonsense syllables. A vs B is re-reading vs retrieval practice (Roediger & Karpicke 2006).

30–40 · Mentimeter tour

• SAY: four silly questions, four formats. Notice what each one makes you do. After each, ASK in one line: where could this work in your teaching?
• The four questions (slide 7 notes): multiple choice, 100 points, pin on image, then a ranking: what helps you learn most? listening to a talk / taking notes / explaining it to someone / working it through with colleagues / “nothing, just biscuits and tea”. Keep the ranking result for Make 10 minutes active; don’t explain it yet.
• WHY: they meet each format as a learner, low stakes: the preview for this week’s ask. It’s also the gap before the retest (don’t mention that). → experiential learning
• FALLBACK: hands up; sticky notes on a flipchart; dot stickers on a printed picture.
• IF SHORT: three formats.

40–45 · Surprise retest → the forgetting curve

• Hand out the retest slips: “Quick: what’s a blorp?” Two minutes. Score 1 per meaning roughly right; tally Group A vs Group B on the whiteboard.
• Be ready for either result. Over ten minutes, re-reading often does as well or better. That’s what Roediger & Karpicke found: re-study won at 5 minutes; testing won at 2 days and a week. SAY (A wins): “re-reading feels better, and today it works. Watch what happens over a week.” SAY (B wins): “already. Now imagine a week.”
• Then the drawn forgetting curve (four clicks: no review → Day 2 review → Day 3 review → labels). SAY: most of it goes fast, then levels off; each time you pull it back out, it fades more slowly. That’s why the sessions are a week apart. → Ebbinghaus (1885)
• Collect the slips, names on, and keep them for Session 3. Don’t mention the retest.

45–50 · Spot the strategy

• Each table: the four mats (retrieval, spacing, interleaving, elaboration), the “None of the above” bin, and a shuffled set of 14 daft scenario cards. Sort them. Some fit two: arguing is encouraged.
• Debrief, one question: which did you just do in the last 25 minutes? (Retrieval: the Kahoot and the retest. Spacing: a week, and the Menti gap. Elaboration: “where could this work?”)
• WHY: some of the strongest evidence in learning science (Dunlosky et al. 2013). Active learning beats lecturing (Freeman et al. 2014; say it was STEM undergraduates). Naming by sorting is itself elaboration. → interleaving

50–70 · Make 10 minutes of your session active

• Show the ranking result from the Menti tour. SAY: that’s what we feel helps. Research puts them in an order: listening, then doing something with it, then explaining it in your own words, then working it through together. The more people do with an idea, the more they tend to learn. It’s a scale, not percentages: the “learning pyramid” (5% for lectures, 90% for teaching others) was never measured. WHY: ICAP (Chi & Wylie 2014); like the blorps, what feels like it works today isn’t always what lasts. → active is a scale
• SAY: take the session you rebuilt last week. Pick ten minutes. Make learners do something, in its real setting: ward corridor, handover, sim room. Use at least one strategy (the mats stay on the table as a menu).
• On paper: one A3 sheet: what learners do, which strategy, what you need, what happens if you’re interrupted. Setting cards for anyone without a real setting.
• SAY (“Sometimes the best slide is no slide”): the answer might have no screen at all.
• PAIR by confidence. Circulate. ASK: what will learners be doing in minute 3? Which strategy is that? How far up the scale does it go: listening, doing, explaining, or working it through together? (active is a scale)
• WHY: situated learning: design for the real constraints, not the ideal room (Lave & Wenger 1991).
• FALLBACK: no session yet? Use “a session you’d like to teach”.

70–80 · 60-second pitches

• SAY: 60 seconds each. Room responds with one thing that works, one question.
• WHY: explaining your own design is elaboration; hearing others gives varied worked examples.
• Larger group: gallery walk with sheets on the wall, sticky-note questions.
• IF SHORT: cut this first.

80–88 · Menti demo → the ask

• DEMO first (2 minutes, live on screen, narrating each click): sign in to Menti, make one word-cloud slide, click Share, copy the link. Point to the Computer Task Sheet for the same steps on paper.
• Show the card wording: “Before next week I will spend 30–40 minutes playing with Menti or Kahoot and make one active learning thing for my session, and bring it.”
• SAY: write it on the card now. Add when you’ll do the 30–40 minutes. Photograph it. You don’t need a class: just play from the presenter’s side. Email yourself the link.
• WHY: a time-boxed, written intention (implementation intentions). Building it yourself is the active experimentation step of Kolb’s cycle.
• IF SHORT: never cut. Start it at 80 minutes, even mid-pitch.

88–90 · Cliffhanger → close

• SAY: “Next week: did it land?” And how would you know? Hold that thought.
• Optional: one-question pulse (see the Evaluation Toolkit).

After the session

• Next session opens with “Try what you made”: 2–3 participants run their Menti or Kahoot on the group. Message a few people during the week to ask if they’re happy to go first.
• Keep the Kahoot results as Level 2 evidence (Evaluation Toolkit).
• Send the pre-Session 3 message. Keep it to the ask.
• Psychological safety, debriefing and feedback are parked for a separate simulation-based session. Point interested people to the theory library.