After a plenary or panel session at a conference, it is helpful to protect time at the end to engage the audience with the content just presented. One idea for doing this is to pose a question for people to reflect on or discuss with others around them (or at their...
Tips for Honouring and Inviting Diversity in Group Learning
by Jeanette Romkema and Jessica Luh Kim In Canada we are fortunate to live with diverse cultural groups. However, at times, the way we communicate or approach interpersonal communication in one’s culture, can influence the way we engage and participate in a...
Enriching Online Learning
Seven participants from across the United States AND one from Fiji, one from UK, another from Peru and three from Toronto!!! What a rich, diverse, provocative learning experience we had! Virtual, online classes provide us all with the exceptional opportunity to expand...
More $#%& in My Face!
I cannot remember her name, but I will always remember our moment. I had just started a new training job, and was visiting my new colleagues, bringing with me a small collection of resources we had developed in my previous team—two books, a few manuals, a CD...
Numbers Don’t Lie
I had been working with a rural community in the Dominican Republic for several months on a housing program. The project relied on strong community involvement and it was frustrating. They were not moving as fast as I thought they could. I was anticipating significant...
Bridging the Economic Divide with Dialogue Education
Maybe you’ve seen it, too. A personal finance lecture. Sterile, individualistic, detached from reality. Few fields are willing to offend the principles of Dialogue Education (DE) like personal finance. For in talking numbers, the myth goes, we are...
How Can We Design and Facilitate for Hospitality?
To feel a sense of belonging is important because it will lead us from conversations about safety and comfort to other conversations, such as our relatedness and willingness to provide hospitality and generosity. Hospitality is the welcoming of strangers, and...
Excellent Engagement
I want to be challenged when I am learning by excellent engagement. By this I mean, I want to be challenged by a learning task that stretches me, moves me to deep reflection and critique, and pushes me to hearty implementation of new concepts, attitudes or skills....
Tuesdays with Jane: Week #1
(Tuesdays with Jane is a virtual learning series for those wishing to read or re-read Jane's books and immediately apply their new learning to their workplace. In preparation for this task, read the Foreword and Preface to the book Learning to Listen,...
Tuesdays with Jane: Week #2
(Tuesdays with Jane is a virtual learning series for those wishing to read or re-read Jane's books and immediately apply their new learning to their workplace. In preparation for this task, read Chapter 1 in the book Learning to Listen,...
Facilitation for Real Ownership
The key to optimizing learning and building long-term memory is to create ‘ownership’ of learning content. (Jensen, 2005; Poldrack et al., 2001) Below are facilitation skills I have been especially aware of lately in my work. These go beyond technique. They are more...
Tuesdays with Jane: Week #3
(Tuesdays with Jane is a virtual learning series for those wishing to read or re-read Jane's books and immediately apply their new learning to their workplace. In preparation for this task, read Chapter 2 in the book Learning to Listen, Learning to...