Notes for Educators: AMA Teaching Methods
The AMA teaching methods are Activate, Motivate, and Assess.
Interact with the
group and solicit each student’s contribution. Engage your students in collaborative learning (let them work in
teams) and collaborative teaching –
give the stage to your students so they can review the material and share their
best practices. One learns twice while teaching! Reward the best contributors.
Use all possible
means to connect the course materials to the students’ areas of expertise, thus
increasing their motivation level. Motivation is the key to opening students’
eyes and ears and unlocking their memories.
Facilitate a question-and-answer session, let students work in groups, and help them keep precise focus and timing.
Use the on-line assessment and evaluation forms periodically from the very beginning of the course.
This book provides a special
section at the end of each chapter to reinforce the AMA methods.
The Integrating Questions are designed to
help students build a thorough understanding of the relevance, relationships,
and application of the content in the real world. To ensure that students can
relate course theories to the workplace, illustrate points with examples drawn
from your professional experience and the experiences of the students.
The Case Study serves as a guide for student assignments. The instructor can modify and personalize assignments based on instructor-student interactions and early assessments of a student’s current and desired skills.
It is recommended that you conduct two or three student recap presentations (ten to fifteen minutes each) starting with the second class. The content of each presentation is the student’s work on the Case Study–based assignments. The presentations may serve as midterm assessments. They also increase students’ motivation level and their understanding of the material (you learn twice while teaching).
It is recommended to format assignments and presentations as illustrated white papers using, for example, Web pages, MS Word, PDF, or PowerPoint with notes. The content considers three levels of the topic: definition (high level), functionality and applicability (middle level), and examples of implementations (low level). These three levels roughly map the “why,” “what,” and “how” of the selected subject. Students will enhance their ability to clearly express their ideas and will learn the art of publishing and presentation with text, images, diagrams, and code extracts.
Students may integrate selected parts of their weekly work assignments into team projects. This approach helps the student increase the quality of his or her work and consistently focus on the course materials.
Integration is not a copy-and-paste process. The team project allows students to exercise the tool that comes with this book and helps them share their work with a distributed knowledge repository. The high visibility of a student’s achievement adds to the perfection of her or his work and makes it possible to directly tie student’s efforts to industry needs.