A cherished group of beautiful people gathered at Karen Ridout’s home in Raleigh on June 30th to celebrate with me as I entered my 80th year. What fun! Good food, good friends, good wine, good conversation. And lots of laughter! I am a deeply grateful woman whose daily prayer is THANK YOU. I know this […]
A key practice of both Dialogue Education and Deep Structure Living (www.DeepStructureLiving.com) is reflection. This week, I’m asking: Just how important is reflection to learning, development and performance? Why do I ask this? THE PRAGMATIC: I am interested in continuing to deepen learning so that is meaningfully retained, and transferred, in other words people DO […]
I had the great joy recently of a dialogue with three young fellows in Sweden who were writing their Master’s Thesis on Education for Sustainability. They have been working with Dwayne Hodgson of Ottowa who is Training Director for THE NATURAL STEP – a sustainability research and education program. I read their excellent thesis which […]
Okay, so that title won’t excite the search engines, but how many of you who use Dialogue Education go crazy with frustration every time you get to the What For step in your design process? (For those of you who haven’t used the 8 Steps of Design, the What For is the 6th step in the […]
The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. –Laurent A. Daloz (1999) Just for fun, let’s look at potential alternatives for each of the sentences in this quote. The proper aim of education […]
I remember some time ago, reading an article on silence, what can be learned through and within silence as a part of research projects. I wonder how Dialogue Education practitioners might mine silence even more fully? Here are a few tidbits that come to my mind, still lips, and busy fingers: It is in silence […]
Creative writers all know what’s sometimes called the first rule of writing: show, don’t tell. What does this mean? Here, I’ll show you: TELLING Our fundraiser was really successful and fun. We were filled to capacity and exceeded our goals for income. SHOWING I’ve never seen so many people in our auditorium; they were spilling […]
Just like a photograph can bring a specific dimension of a scene into focus or to our attention. Writing about why we do what we do can bring new insights. Part One B: Teasing-Out How Our Theory of Learning/Teaching Matters Some readers will remember the invitation in the last post of mine (May 27). I […]
Be forewarned: Dialogue Education can spoil you for the average professional conference! Those of you who’ve been involved in Dialogue Education learning events know what I’m talking about: you attend a conference full of talking head panel discussions and you end up spending every session redesigning the curriculum (if you can call it that!). I […]
Teasing-Out Why teasing-out, because research indicates that we aim towards our values, but we may behave differently, and, we may behave differently from one circumstance to another*. So to “tease” or sift, allows us to gently observe, apprehend and reflect upon our practices and the thoughts and influences that produce them. From here, we can […]