About

Accellier is the provider of choice for thousands of people and hundreds of organisations in Australia and around the world. Under our former name SAVE Training, we built a solid foundation on which Accellier now stands, embodying almost 10 years of service to Australia’s Tertiary and Vocational Education Sector. As a testament to this, since our inception in 2010 we have spent only a few thousand dollars on advertising. Our clients are almost entirely referred from our happy graduates and business customers.

Accellier is the trading name of SAVE Training Pty Ltd and is a Registered Training Organisation (RTO 32395) that offers a range of nationally recognised courses in education and business Australia wide through our online and face to face courses.

Our mission is to enhance people’s value through excellence in service and learning outcomes.

Professional Development Webinar Recording

This session was summary of over 20 teaching strategies and techniques that educators in Vocational Education and Training (VET) can use.

It was delivered in no particular order, to create a simple collection of techniques for reference. They are mostly high-level strategies that can be adapted into different contexts.

Here’s the webinar replay:

Strategies Addressed

STRATEGY SUMMARY
Discussions Pose an open question for students to discuss in pairs or small groups, encouraging note-taking and a spokesperson to report back key themes to the wider group. This can be adapted for various group sizes and benefits from clear, thought-provoking questions, time limits, and facilitator summarisation of emerging ideas. Think-Pair-Share is a common variation.
Case Study Present realistic scenarios from vocational contexts (text, audio, or video) for learners to analyse, identify issues, consider perspectives, and propose solutions, individually or collaboratively. Effective case studies are highly relevant, thoughtfully complex, and aligned with clearly defined learning objectives, often with guiding questions.
Instruction/Presentation/Lecture Deliver engaging, articulate, and enthusiastic speech, often with visuals, ensuring clarity, specificity, and relevance to the learning objectives. While time limits are debated (consider shorter segments of 10 mins), it’s crucial that students can apply the presented information in subsequent activities, making it an active rather than entirely passive experience.
Worked Examples and Demonstrations (Explicit Teaching) Provide a clear, step-by-step demonstration of a task or problem-solving process, explicitly stating the steps, rationale, and potential variations. Learners observe this demonstration before engaging in guided and independent practice, with complex tasks broken down and detailed instructions provided initially.
Simulated Work Environments (beyond Role-Play & Simulations) Create elaborate setups that closely replicate real-world workplaces, incorporating authentic conditions and complex operational environments to provide a highly realistic learning experience.
Group Work Engage learners in collaborative activities in pairs or small groups to achieve a shared goal, emphasising shared responsibility, interdependence, and social interaction. Effective group work requires tasks that necessitate collaboration, clear goals and roles, a supportive environment, explicit instructions, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms.
Testing (as a learning strategy – not assessment) Use frequent, low-stakes testing as “Retrieval Practice” to actively strengthen memory and understanding by encouraging learners to recall information and identify knowledge gaps. This effortful retrieval (“Desirable Difficulty”) builds more robust knowledge and provides an accurate measure of understanding, especially when coupled with feedback.
Role-Play & Simulations Have learners act out real-world scenarios in specific roles, preceded by clear briefings (written, verbal, or visual) and demonstrations as needed, with understanding checked beforehand. Post-activity discussions and questions help consolidate learning in a safe environment that encourages risk-taking, with consideration for hesitant participants and potential introduction of unexpected elements.
Structured Questioning Employ carefully crafted questions that go beyond simple recall to stimulate thinking, guide inquiry, check understanding, and encourage connections between new information and existing knowledge. Planning questions in advance, allowing response time, and using answers to facilitate further discussion are key.
Peer Feedback / Peer Learning Involve learners in providing constructive feedback to each other on their work or performance, both giving and receiving input based on provided criteria or rubrics. The focus is on learning and improvement in a non-competitive environment, encouraging active listening and a non-defensive approach to feedback.
Guided Practice/Scaffolding Provide structured support as learners begin to apply new skills or knowledge, following an “I do, we do, you do” approach with step-by-step guidance, frequent checks for understanding, and immediate feedback. Support is gradually withdrawn as competence increases, aiming for a high success rate before independent practice.
Ask-it-Basket Use an anonymous collection method (ballot box, basket, etc.) for students to submit written questions, which are then read out and addressed at strategic points in the learning session. Pre-loading with initial questions can encourage participation.
Coaching Involve observing a learner’s performance of a skill or task, followed by providing specific guidance and advice aimed at improving their performance towards a defined objective, often in a shorter-term, goal-focused relationship.
Mentoring Offer hyper-specific guidance and support tailored to an individual by an expert, focusing on their personal growth, performance, and achievement of goals, potentially including connections to other experts, often in a longer-term relationship than coaching.
Independent activities, projects, tasks and practice Assign tasks and activities for students to complete alone to consolidate learning, deepen understanding, and practice skills, ensuring these follow quality instruction and guided practice and have a clear objective understood by the learner.
Project-based Learning Engage learners in authentic, complex projects over an extended period, where the project serves as the primary vehicle for learning knowledge and skills, often mirroring workplace challenges and requiring collaboration and presentation. This approach demands frequent support, feedback, and measurement against learning outcomes, and is suited for more advanced learners.
Work placement / work experience Place students in real job settings to gain practical, real-world experience, emphasising good workplace relationships, appropriate supervision, access to experienced workers, clear objectives, monitoring, communication, and student wellbeing.
Videos Incorporate relevant videos into learning, ideally combined with other strategies like questioning or activities, to showcase situations difficult to replicate, demonstrate consequences, broaden examples, expose students to expert practices, provide visual explanations, and allow for detailed observation through slow motion or zooming. (Respecting copyright is essential)
Feedback Provide students with feedback on their work, responses, contributions, and skill performance, with the depth and quality matching the task complexity. Effective feedback aims to improve poor performance, reinforce good performance, build confidence, and encourage engagement, especially when scaffolding is being reduced.
Student-Led Instruction Have advanced learners research and present relevant learning topics to their peers, ensuring content accuracy through prior feedback and instructor presence to correct any inaccuracies.
Reflection Encourage students to actively reflect on their performance through structured activities like open questions, journaling, discussion boards, or self-assessment, making the process more deliberate than simply asking them to think about it.
Technology/Online asynchronous learning Utilize interactive digital media such as quizzes, hotspots, labelling, interactive diagrams, games, interactive videos, pre-recorded webinars, podcasts, VR/AR, online discussions, social learning, and querying AI language models to enable students to apply knowledge or practice retrieval.
Games Introduce fun, interactive challenges (“gamification”) like Kahoots, pop quizzes, or physical games with points, rewards, and incentives to apply learning material, ensuring a direct relevance to the learning objectives rather than being purely for entertainment.

Session Slide Deck

Here is the link to the NCVER research summary by Tabatha Griffin and Nicki Davidson: “Effective teaching and learning: teacher perspectives on what works best for whom”

NCVER Research Summary

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