Session-specific teaching activities

As part of face-to-face course delivery, you’ll be teaching DAFNE principles using practical, classroom based activities with small groups or pairs of participants. Classroom based activities require planning and resources to cover the content of the session and to enable participants achieve the learning outcomes. The following are some suggestions and teaching tips for specific course sessions.

For this session, you’ll need kitchen scales along with the following: an assortment of different sized plates and bowls for participants to measure their portion into; a selection of different household measures that participants may have at home such as measuring cups and spoons; a variety of culturally appropriate cooked foods that contain carbohydrate like cereals, different types of bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and fruit; as well as 1 CP of individual cooked foods already weighed and plated to aid visual estimation. Think about where you will source cooked, dried and fresh foods from. Will your catering department supply them, or will you supply cooked foods from your own home? How will these be budgeted for and if you are cooking them at home, when will you do this? In this session, participants will complete activity 14 in their activities books. In order for them to do so, you also need to provide an assortment of food labels for them to use to count CPs in their own serving size. Food labels should include some containing slowly digested carbs that may not need to be counted and carb values for suggested serving sizes and per 100 g.

If your venue is large enough, create work stations around the room where participants can complete the activities in their activities book and those outlined in the lesson plan. Provide clear instructions for each work station and, if necessary, write the steps for the activities on the flipchart and keep it in the line of sight of participants as they work through each activity. For example, in activity 15 – step 1: put your own portion of food (cereal, rice etc.) onto a plate or into a dish and estimate the CPs in your own portion (your fellow group members can also help you to ‘guess’). This is visual estimation. Write your estimate in the ‘guess value’ column. Step 2: weigh your portion size to work out the ‘actual’ CP value and write this in the ‘actual value’ column and compare the results. Step 3: look at the pre-weighed and measured foods of 1 CP (rice, pasta, potatoes, or chips). Use these to help you make a more accurate visual estimation of the CPs in your own serving size. Estimating the CPs in your own portion in these activities can be helpful because you’ll build up a visual memory so when you’re eating away from home (when you may not have access to measuring cups, spoons and digital scales) you’ll feel more confident about the estimates you make. We recommend that both educators are present in the session and both educators circulate between work stations to offer support where needed.

The activities book contains scenario based activities, for example, managing physical activity and exercise, illness management and sick day rules. These can be completed in pairs around the main table. An alternative method is to print out the answers to the activities and place them around the room, then ask the participant pairs to circulate around the room to find the answer that matches the scenario they have been given. This method is useful if you need to increase the energy in the room, for example, if the session is just after lunch or participants have found a previous session challenging.

The insulin regimen session uses many visual resources to help participants become familiar with the action times of their own insulins. You can increase the energy level in the room by making the participants move around the room at the beginning of an activity. So, for example, prepare a flip chart in advance with six sections, each one labelled as a type of insulin. Section 1: intermediate-acting (i.e. isophane). Section 2: long-acting insulin analogues. Section 3: ultra-long-acting insulin analogue. Section 4: quick-acting analogues. Section 5: ultra-quick-acting insulin analogues. Section 6: other (mixed insulin or older types of QA / BI). Emphasise to your participants that ‘quick acting’ refers to mealtime insulin, not to be confused with ‘rapid acting’ which refers to the type of carbs used to treat a hypo. In this activity, ask your participants to write their own insulins on post it notes and add them to the flip chart in the relevant section. Alternatively, you may like to create and use an insulin sorting game or quiz.