How to plan a teaching session...?

Question

Have to plan a teaching session for a small group (adults) on managing hypertension...any suggestion, hints, ideas on how to go about it, what to include, participant activities, methods of feedback, etc?

Answer 1

Hypertension is blood pressure right?

All lessons (whatever the subject matter) have the following characteristics:

An object or reason for teaching it. (to aid folks to lower their bp)

A goal for the particular session (How to read the BP gauge)

A beginning activity: 5 mins (Learning the pieces of the bp gauge)

The body of teaching 35 mins (you have to sort this one out!) Lecture, or q and a in a work sheet or reading from a source book

An activity to illustrate the goal 10mins (have people take bp, run for 5 mins [or watch a scary movie scene or something] and take it again)

Analysis of the activity 7 mins

Conclusions where you draw all the pieces together. Ask for questions and give answers. 10 minutes or less.

This lesson would last an hour.

Answer 2

Well, it depends on how long you plan to teach. I'll give you some guidelines and examples, but there aren't a lot of fun activities floating around out there for hypertension. :)

First define your objectives.
EX. By the end of this lesson students/participates will be able to identify hypertension and provide examples of modifications to their lifestyles to manage their hypertension.

Then define what materials you'll need and who will provide it.
EX. Paper, Pencil, provided by me

Then plan your lesson.
Is there any schema? Do they already know what hypertension is or are you going to provide the definition?

You might give them the definition and have them form small groups and discuss lifestlyes or factors that cause hypertension. Then you could ask each group to give you two possibilities. Then, given the lifestyle and factor list you can generate a list of lifestyle modifications that can help. However, given you have a group of adults, this can take as little as ten minutes.

You might give each a PASSPORT TO HEALTH. Inside they can write their names, draw pix of themselves (get crayons!), you can have some information already in there about statistics, the definition, etc. And the some pages blank that they can use to take notes in your small group discussion. They can share their pictures with others and introduce themselves to each other before discussion. Or if you think that is too "kidsy," prepare some hand-outs with information from webMD or wilkipedia. You might have a T/F quiz to test their knowledge. For example, "True or False. Hypertension can be cured." Then you can shock them with the results! You can stress the fact that there is no cure and no symptoms, so its important to manage your health and get regular check-ups.

Do your homework, because the end of the session is when you will open it up for questions.

If you want them to give you feedback, the best way would be an anonymous form that you can either put open ended or rating questions. For example, "Did you find the material informative? Was the class engaging?" Or "On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the best, how informative was this class?"

I hope this helps--this was a hard question.