Young people learn in different ways, so it’s very important to ensure activities appeal to all learning styles:

Visual: learning through seeing, visual stimulus

• Use visual aids such as drawings, photos, plans.
• Draw attention to architectural elements students can see.

Aural: learning through listening and speaking

• Encourage discussion.
• Encourage question and answer.
• Presentation of ideas/ findings to the group.

Kinesthetic: learning doing hands on activities

• Role-play – acting out ideas such as scale.
• Sketching, taking photos.
• Physically interacting with the architecture such as touching different surfaces to understand properties of materials and textures, measuring spaces.

Planning and delivering a successful session

• Plan your session to meet the needs of the target audience.
• Young people will be familiar with lessons that have a clear structure, with a clearly defined beginning and conclusion.
• Vary the pace and content and pace of activities.

• Structure your session with activities for small group sizes or for whole class learning.
• Give due consideration to your architectural vocabulary. It can be difficult communicating architectural knowledge through language and vocabulary to young people, particularly technical and descriptive vocabulary. Ask the students if any of them know what a word means before explaining it to them. This sets a dialogue up between architect and student and reinforces the meaning of words that some students may be just becoming familiar with.

Methods of investigation

Draw, vote, act out, write, question, design, debate, make, discuss, research, build, read, argue, model, reflect, draw, present, observe.

Creative productions

Graph, leaflet, poster, chart, role-play, map, diagram, model, diary, presentation.

Some useful materials to have with you

Architectural drawings of the building, (an advantage but by no means a must have), a tape measure, paper and pencils.

Session plan example

1. Beginning

• What: aims & subjects / themes for the session.
• Why: what is the importance/ relevance of these aims?
• How: activities / plan to achieve these aims.

2. Activity 1

• Interactive class discussion.
• Introduce new concepts, questions and ideas.
• Relate new ideas to the familiar.

3. Activity 2

• Breakout into small groups for team investigations.
• Brainstorm ideas and new topics.

4. Activity 3

• Collate results in a creative way.
• Present findings to class.
• Gain feedback from peers and adults.

5. End

• Sum up.
• Give praise.
• Next steps.

Delivering a successful session

• Use positive language.
• Be friendly & encouraging.

• Be flexible.
• Work as a team.
• Ask for volunteers.
• Ask open questions.
• Ask why.
• Maintain eye contact.
• Be prepared to re-word the question and to give examples.