Every teaching or meeting situation is unique and offers its own challenges. I work in rural Africa and have found the follow seven tools especially helpful for engaging community members. Use appreciative inquiry. In every community some things have worked well. It...
One thing that a learning-centered approach helps learners do is connect. It is with this connection that learners can more fully and easily learn. It is with this type of connecting that we maximize the possibility of real change.
I took the Foundations of Dialogue Education course with Global Learning Partners (GLP) in October 2017. The most powerful take-away for me was to think about what the learners will be doing with the content rather than what I will be saying or presenting. Perhaps it...
Numbers have a whole world of information beneath them. Making decisions on numbers alone can get you into trouble. At a recent meeting to evaluate and adapt the pilot of a six-week online course, my colleague Jeanette Romkema and I shared the numbers about level of...
How does a facilitator know when groups or individuals are hard at work on a task you have set, or are stuck and want some help? When learners are hard at work for extended periods of time, I don’t hover. These are times for me to get out of the way, so learning...
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....
[my doodle: June 2014] "Am I boring you?" I was doodling during a university faculty meeting. My department head noticed I was working on an elaborate abstract shape while he was talking about research budgets and changes in the grading policies. He assumed...
“We are weary of academic conferences.” That’s how Christy Wampole starts her article The Conference Manifesto in The New York Times (posted May 4th 2015). Indeed, I can relate to that. In fact, it is getting increasingly challenging for me to go to conferences at...
Winding our way through Bali last spring, we observed people throughout the island offer small, hand-woven baskets to their gods. These daily baskets were lovingly filled with sandalwood incense, fresh flowers, and a local food item such as fish, or other real food,...
As more leaders recognize that working in silos does not achieve the extraordinary results that can come with cross-department, cross-discipline, and cross-sectoral collaboration, the question becomes: “How do we engage people?”
This afternoon I was working on revisions for a syllabus of an upcoming fall course. The course was designed using the principles and practices of Dialogue Education. A large part of this design was honed through the feedback of a dear colleague, Jim Wilhoit (see...
PowerPoint. We love it. We hate it. We abandoned it to flirt with Prezi. Then we came back. It's like that relationship we know is not good for us, but we keep it on speed dial. So, we won't give you the long list of how not to use PowerPoint. You've been there and...