Today begins a new series called Blogging Towards Baltimore. Why Baltimore? Because that's where we'll be learning together at the International Dialogue Education Institute, Oct 24-27, 2013. Each post will help to set the stage for the Institute. Dialogue Education...
The system that is Dialogue Education demands safety. Learners must feel safe with the content, with the teacher, with the environment, with their colleagues. The designer/teacher must feel safe with her partners, with her design, with the group of learners, with the...
My good friend Agnes took the course Learning To Listen, Learning To Teach years ago. She had a hard time, as a professor, moving from telling to teaching, using Dialogue Education. We walked around the lake in Raleigh N.C. many a time while I gave examples of...
"If I only had enough time I could cover this subject!" You may have said this yourself. And I'd be surprised if you hadn't heard other teachers say it! If the content of a learning event is worth its salt in meaning and significance, you'll never...
One of the best ways to show respect of a group of learners is to put them to work on learning a tough set of relevant, immediately useful, complex, intricate and dense content (or, in Dialogue Education's 8 Steps of Design, what we like to call the WHAT). Such...
It’s true, my friends! Teachers are neuroplasticians. In The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Norman Doidge M.D. coins the word neuroplasticians to describe those who – quite literally – change the brain. I...
I have a raging new agenda: inclusion. I believe this agenda will be a great challenge to me and to all Dialogue Educators since we see the value in small groups working together to learn via learning tasks. In the words of Danah Zohar, we want to hear "a chorus of...
We know from biology that fear incites the amygdala in the brain to pour adrenalin into the bloodstream, to give us the sudden energy that gets us out of a burning building. We know that while the amygdala is working, synapses in the brain are inhibited so we can...
[Note: this piece was originally published in 2003. We love it, and have asked Jane to update it for 2015 with her new thinking.] I love the change of seasons: from winter to spring, from spring to the hot days of summer, from summer to the crisp, blue-sky autumn....
One of my favorite axioms is: There are three things that make effective learning happen, in this order: time, time and time. While the wry humor in that axiom always gets a belated laugh, the significance and meaning it offers is not at all trivial. I discovered the...
When my friend Maria and I get together, watch out world! Sunday, over a cup of tea on the back porch, we struggled with this axiom: Don’t tell what you can ask Don’t ask if you know the answer, Tell, in dialogue “How?” asked Maria. “How do you tell in dialogue?”...
Fatemeh is a graduate student at the Tarbiat Modares University of Tehran. After discovering On Teaching and Learning on the shelf of the university library, she wrote me an email and we have had a vigorous virtual conversation ever since! Fatemeh found a copy of...