It just appeared in your calendar — the mysterious 1.5-hour meeting. You are one of eight invitees. The attached agenda has four topics you’ve heard something about around the office. You click “accept” and quietly say goodbye to 1.5 hours. At Global Learning Partners, we teach practical tools for planning and leading effective meetings — […]
Farm Radio International (FRI) teaches broadcasters across Africa how to produce high quality, entertaining, relevant radio programs that will improve results for rural farmers. In-station training is a fundamental part of our work with broadcasters, but we identified two key issues with our approach: Stations were balking at dedicating so much time to the training, […]
“Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.” –George Bernard Shaw Prakesh handed a worksheet to each trio of participants. Then he directed us all to the poster hanging on the wall behind him, which his teammate had just walked us through, and explained how we could use […]
I’ve been in school, one way or the other, on both sides of the desk for the past eighty years. I have never been in a school where my learning was so delightful, my appetite for it so voracious, my joy in it so deep – as this “School of the 80s.” As I tried […]
Learning events that are co-facilitated can pose unique challenges, but the payoff is worth it. Two (or more) facilitators, when they work well together, can bring different styles, varied perspectives and model teamwork. If you are the ‘senior’ facilitator… Build the relationship. Even when multiple facilitators are coming together for a single learning event, the […]
Social change is a complex process and does not follow linear steps or procedures. And, it is not usually fast. Recently, I met some community members in rural areas of Ethiopia where many international and local NGOs have worked for a long time. I asked the community members to tell me the positive change they […]
I could have titled this blog post “The Travelling Consultant’s Nightmare” but I’ve opted for “Turning Lemons into Lemonade.” This is a story of turning a bad story into a good one! When you were a child, did you ever hear the riddle: What’s the most important thing to have at a party? Common answers […]
Silence. Total silence. It was after one of the highlights for me of the Digital Education Masters program through The University of Edinburgh. Two world experts in their field had been discussing their topic together in a Skype class, with the rest of us listening in from around the world. When they finished, we were […]
There were many challenges throughout my course. Electricity was intermittent. English, the language of communication, had varying levels of understanding among participants. But the biggest challenge was the cultural shift to a dialogue approach to learning; a big shift for many in other courses too, but even more so here. Yet over the week I […]
One participant came to speak to me about how the training session had been for her. At this early stage as a trainer, I had thought it had been good, but I listened. I had engaged participants with the content and had facilitated good discussion, either in small groups within the class or sometimes as […]