Concepts: Concept Centers
What Is a Concept Center?
A Concept Center is a table, wall, or designated area in the training room where participants learn or review a specific topic-related concept, or practice a topic-related skill.
You can have one or many Concept Centers set up around the room. Learners participate in the centers at designated times during the training day. Concept Centers can be part of the direct instruction, part of an active review, or a combination of both. If the centers are part of the direct instruction, they will be included in the Concepts step of the 4 Cs design and delivery model. If they are part of the active review or skills practice, they will be a Concept Practice step. This might sound confusing, but it illustrates the versatility of Concept Centers. You can easily have both direct instruction and concrete practice going on the room at the same time, especially if the training lasts a day or more.
With Concept Centers, as with most of the activities in this part of the book, you step aside as learners teach and learn from each other, with guidance from you, as needed.
Here are the major components of Concept Centers:
• Content-related. Concept Centers need to be relevant to the content being learned. They aren’t fill-in activities, like fun but nonessential games. Instead, they are an integral part of the learning.
• Posted purpose. The purpose for each Concept Center needs to be clearly printed and visible so that learners know the reason why participation in the center is important. The purpose can be simple: “To review our company’s history and growth.” Or it can be more behaviorally specific: “To demonstrate competency in running the database program.” The purpose can also be one of learning new content: “To be able to explain five important facts about our online security protocol” or “To list the steps of our company’s billing process.”
• Learner interest. In training, anything that arouses curiosity and sustains interest is beneficial. So Concept Centers should be visually interesting. Examples are wall charts or game pieces in bright colors, a variety of graphics, activity titles that create curiosity, or interactive worksheets that capture learners’ attention.
• Clear instructions. Whether you post the instructions on a wall chart, a handout, a game card, or a worksheet, the instructions have to be easily understood and clear enough for learners to follow. This way, valuable training time isn’t wasted while learners try to figure out what to do. Before including a new Concept Center, have a colleague read the instructions and explain them back to you so you know the instructions are clear enough.
• Time limits. Learners need to know how much time will be allotted for each center activity. If rotating centers, you can use an auditory signal (upbeat music, a bell, a chime, or horn) to signal starting, stopping, and rotating.
What Does a Concept Center Do?
By using Concept Centers as part of the direct instruction, you can
• Introduce new information in interactive and interesting ways.
• Add to what learners already know about the topic.
• Provide more resources for learners to explore on their own.
• Keep participants’ interest and motivation high.
• Review what you have already taught during this, or previous, training.
• Make your training unique, engaging, and memorable for the learners.
By participating in Concept Centers, learners will
• Explore new concepts in hands-on ways.
• Remain engaged and alert during the direct instruction.
• Review information using a variety of interesting review formats.
• Deepen their understanding and levels of competency.
• Increase their interest, enthusiasm, and motivation to learn.
Getting Ready
• Materials: For most centers, provide standard training materials, in addition to the specific materials needed for some of the activities below.
• Setup: Ideally, Concept Centers should be set up on tables around the perimeter of the room, in designated areas, or scattered throughout the room. If there isn’t enough space for this, use the tables at which participants are sitting. Another option is to put materials and instructions for each center in a bag, box, or manila envelope and pass these out to table groups during the scheduled center time.
• Group Size: Concept Center groups should be from four to six people. Larger groups than that are unwieldy and lessen the amount of individual participation. Smaller groups are fine, as long as the center isn’t a game that needs more participants than two or three people.
• Time: If you are running a number of Concept Centers at the same time, allow about ten to twenty minutes for each activity. If there is only one center in the room, participants may have to take turns visiting it, so the activity may be only about five minutes in length. Or learners may choose to participate in the center at breaks or meals, when they have a longer period of time.
Five Concept Center Activities
1. Table Centers
You will need appropriate activity materials for each Table Center you create. You will also need posted instructions for each center. Do the following:
• Until you feel comfortable using Concept Centers in your training, make your first center a simple one, with one or two review games you create before the training. Set up a game table against one wall of the training room. It will be a Concept Center that learners can visit at different times during the training. For game suggestions, see the Learner-Created Games section in Part Three of this book (these games are simple ones using index cards and paper).
• Post a wall chart above the table that reads: “Game Center—Try Your Luck!” or something similar, which will pique participants’ curiosity and interest.
• Instruct learners to visit the Concept Center during breaks or meals. They will choose a game and spend about five minutes playing it with colleagues in the training or with their table group. When they finish, they return the game to the center for other groups to play.
• If you have enough review games at the Concept Center, you can designate a five- or ten-minute period of time during the training in which all table groups play a game of their choice at the same time.
Table Center variations include:
• Game Table Rotations. Using the same review games as mentioned above, put the games at separate tables around the room instead of on one table. During a designated time, small groups gather at each table to play a game, then rotate to another table to play a different game.
• Centers with New Content. Once you become comfortable enough with a Concept Center review activity, create a Concept Center that covers new material—some nice-to-know information about the topic. This is content that adds value to what you are teaching, but that you won’t be covering in your lecture segments. It may be reading material, a short quiz with answers, or a self-correcting, fill-in-the-blank worksheet along with printed material. Encourage learners to visit the Concept Center during the training.
• Table Center Rotations. If you decide to have learners rotate through a series of Concept Centers over an hour or two of training time, use the tables at which learners are already seated as the centers. Decide what activities will take place at each center, and have all necessary materials available on each table so that learners don’t have to hunt for materials. You explain the guidelines to them:
• Stay with your center group and choose a group leader.
• Read the center instructions and participate in the activity.
• The center time lasts (give length of time) minutes. The signal to rotate clockwise is (give signal).
• Clean up the center for the next group to use before you rotate to the next center.
You may choose to have them do all the rotations sequentially, one after the other. Or learners can do a number of rotations in the morning, take a lunch break, then finish the rotations in the afternoon. Follow the entire center time with a whole group discussion about the centers. Ask:
• What were the most important facts you learned about the training topic from the Concept Centers?
• What activity was most beneficial for you and why?
• What are some topic-related questions you still have?
• What are some other topic-related areas you wish to explore?
• What other observations or comments do you have about the Concept Center activities?
See the two specific examples of Table Center rotations at the end of this chapter for a more detailed look at how to use this Concept Centers variation.
2. Wall Centers
Do the following:
• Designate a wall area as a Concept Center, and create the center before the training.
• On the Wall Center, post charts with topic-related concepts, facts, questions, and so on. To make the posted information more interesting, you may want to give the Wall Center an interesting title such as: “What You Didn’t Know But Wanted to Learn (about the topic)” or “Believe It or Not” or “Little Known Facts (about the topic).”
• If you want learners to do an activity using the information posted on the walls, also post the instructions for the activity. A training example: In an insect abatement class for a pest control company, the Wall Center contained a display of different household pests—photos, descriptions, habitats, invasive signs, etc. Also posted was a list of discussion questions, as well as blank charts for learners to write a summary statement after they discussed one of the questions. The posted questions included:
• After reading the information on this wall, what do you know about insect abatement that you didn’t know before?
• What can you do with this information?
• In addition to this information, what else might be helpful to know?
• What are other resources you can use to add to what you now know?
• Explain the purpose of the center and invite learners to visit the center sometime during the training. Or visiting the center can be a mandatory part of the training.
Wall Center variations:
• Learner-Created. If the training lasts longer than a day, invite learners to create one or more Wall Centers. These can be simple displays of content they’ve learned from the training, or the Wall Centers can include content from Warm-Up activities and other resources (see Warm-Ups in Part One of this book).
• Add to It. Start a Wall Center with a concept title, graphic, and perhaps one or two pieces of information. Invite learners to add their own information charts to it during the training.
• Concept Collage. Invite learners to bring to the training anything related to the topic that can be hung on a wall: photos, newspaper or web articles, website URLs, topic-related objects, book titles, and so on. Ask for volunteers to create a wall collage from all these materials. Learners can add to the collage throughout the training.
3. Discussion Centers
Similar to the structure of The World Cafe (see the chapter titled “The World Cafe: An Innovative Process with Conversations That Matter”), Discussion Centers are areas of the room in which specific topic-related discussions take place among small groups of learners. Do the following:
• Designate one or more Discussion Center areas in the room.
• At each center, post one of the following: a question to answer, a concept to talk about, a problem to solve, application of the information learned or anything else that is relevant and topic- or concept-related.
• One learner in each group takes notes during the discussion and then tapes the notes to the Discussion Center instructions chart. Or each small group creates a short statement summarizing its discussion, prints the summary on chart paper, and hangs it on the wall.
4. Computer Centers
Do the following:
• Transform a computer lab into Concept Centers by designating a certain number of computers as Computer Centers.
• The center instructions can either be on the computer screen or posted on paper beside the computer.
• Learners form pairs or triads and rotate from computer to computer. At each Computer Center, they follow the posted instructions, discuss what they learned, and then reset the computer for the next rotation group.
Two examples of Computer Centers:
• For a training on a new database program, each Computer Center contains instructions for learners to do a practice activity with a segment of the program. Participants work in pairs and mentor each other while they practice.
• At an insurance company training, each Computer Center contains different policy coverage information. Working in pairs, learners read the information on the computer screens and then discuss and complete a short, computerized quiz that follows the information segment.
Computer Center variations:
• Internet Searches. If Internet access is available in the computer lab, have different topic-related Internet search activities at each center. For example: At one center, learners search for topic-related web articles; at another, book titles; at a third, topic-related blogs; at a fourth, Wikipedia information. Learners summarize and report their findings to the class after the centers end.
• Blogs. Short for “web log,” a blog is an online journal entry to which readers can add their own comments. You set up the first blog entry at the Computer Center; then learners add their own comments. Your blog entry can be a topic-related question or opinion. Learners’ comments would be answers to the question or comments about your opinion. To find out how to set up a blog, do an Internet search for “set up a blog” or log onto www.blogger.com.
• Pop Quizzes. Post a quiz question for which learners have to find a web-based answer. If you want them to log onto a specific website to find the answer, post that as well.
• Learner-Created Quizzes. Post a topic-related question on the computer screen. The first group discusses and prints their answer to the question. They post a second question. The second rotation group reads the first question and answer, adds to it if they wish, and then answers the second question. They post a third question. The sequence continues until all rotating groups have posted questions and answers.
• Wikis. A wiki is an online encyclopedia. It differs from a blog in that anyone can post entries on a wiki, whereas only one person posts an entry on a blog—all others post comments to the first entry. Log onto www.wikipedia.com or www.wikidot.com to find out more about wikis. At a wiki center, learners add their own topic-related information.
5. Learner-Created Centers
These are Table Centers with a twist: Learners create the Table Centers and then rotate from table to table. Instructions:
• Each table group chooses a piece of training content from a list of possible concepts.
• Make sure all necessary content resources are available at each table: handouts, slides, web access (if necessary), worksheets, and the like. In addition, besides standard training materials such as markers and index cards, each table group has tape, chart paper, construction paper or card stock, extra CDs for a computer center if desired, and so on.
• Table group members familiarize themselves with their specific content segments. Before groups create their center activities, you make sure that they are covering the main ideas of their respective content segments.
• Each group designs and creates a center to teach the content segment to the other groups. Each group chooses a different way to do this: a table game, flashcards, discussion topics, handouts to read, quiz questions and answers, or charts to read. You may decide to post a list of possible center activities and have table groups cross off the ones they choose to make so that all groups don’t choose the same activity. (See Learner-Created Games in Part Three of this book.)
• When all table groups are ready, they rotate tables and do the various center activities created by the other table groups. If time allows, they do enough rotations to visit all centers, other than their own. If time is short, they may only rotate once or twice.
• When the rotation time is over, facilitate a whole-group discussion (or assign one small group to do this) about what they learned, what questions they still have, and any other information they need to know about the content.
Your Turn
Make a Concept Map for Concept Center ideas. Write or draw your ideas here.
Table Center Examples
Example One
The following six Concept Centers were part of a full-day, train-the-trainer program I facilitated. The centers were a combination of two of the 4 Cs steps: Concepts and Concrete Practice. Groups of five or six training participants rotated through all six centers during two hours in the afternoon. Each center rotation lasted about twenty minutes, with a few minutes to clean up and rotate between each activity. The centers were as follow:
• Center One: Using Your Body and Voice. A visiting guest speaker led a series of short, interesting exercises about using effective body language in training. This was new information for the learners.
• Center Two: How Much Do You Know? Learners worked collaboratively on fill-in worksheets that reviewed major concepts covered during the morning. They checked their answers against an answer key. This was a review of previously learned material.
• Center Three: Grab and Gab Game. Learners participated in this competitive game (see Learner-Created Games in Part Three of this book) as an active review of learning styles concepts.
• Center Four: Myth or Fact Game. Individually, learners read a short handout about new instructional design concepts that weren’t part of the content they learned earlier. Afterward, learners played a collaborative Myth or Fact Game (see Learner-Created Games in Part Three of this book) to review the material.
• Center Five: Your Best Practices. Learners participated in a small-group discussion about their best training practices and how to use what they learned earlier in the day with their own training topics.
• Center Six: Strengths and Stretches. This center covered an individual self-assessment that evaluated each learner’s personal training strengths and stretches, with an action-planning section to help turn stretches into strengths. Each participant worked by himself as he read and scored his self-assessment worksheet.
Example Two
The source of this Concept Center example is Amy Perry, sales trainer for Hallmark Cards, Inc. The centers were part of the introduction to new product lines for the newly hired sales representatives. These employees needed to become familiar with all aspects of the products they would be selling: appearances, prices, manufacturing processes, as well as background information on the development of each product. In the past, this introduction was a one-day, product-by-product, lecture-based event.
There were nine table centers set up around a conference room, with one large tri-fold cardboard display at each table for one product line. The product lines included cards, party, stationery, gift wrap, books, movies, music, gifts, and albums. Posted on the product displays were photos and key facts or statistics about the products. Product samples were placed at each center, along with catalogs and supporting documentation about the products.
The employees rotated around the room in groups of three (they could also work individually, if they preferred). They visited each product center and filled out self-directed worksheets at their own pace. They were able to touch and feel the products and read the most recent catalogs they’d actually be selling from. They also gained thorough, in-depth information to support their selling efforts. The Concept Center time lasted for most of the day and allowed for plenty of employee interaction with co-workers and the trainer. The trainer was accessible the entire time--to answer questions and clarify information about the products.
Before the training ended, the trainer gathered the new employees together for a whole group discussion and summary of what they learned about the product lines. The trainer answered final questions, employees evaluated what they learned, and the trainer thanked them for their efforts before they headed out the door.
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