Slapjack Shuffle: Teaching Instructional Method Selection Using Playing Cards

Abstract

A key skill for the health education specialist is mastery of instructional strategies, especially as they relate to program implementation. Providing classroom experiences for undergraduate public health and health education students to be able to creatively and appropriately match methods to learning objectives is essential to successful future programs and initiatives. By completing the Slapjack Shuffle activity, students experience different teaching methods and match them to appropriate learning objective domains. Using decks of playing cards and guided by the instructor, students experience five different teaching methods (verbal instructions, demonstration, lecture, audiovisual, and peer instruction) to determine the advantages and disadvantages of using each when teaching a psychomotor skill. The lesson concludes with a game designed to create a physiological stress response to illustrate how a health educator could introduce the topic of stress management to a target population. Suggestions for assessing student mastery of the concepts taught include traditional assessment and student teaching demonstration. Student feedback for the activity is positive, with most reporting the activity as effective and memorable.