Improve Your Writing – Beware Little Timidities

The following post is adapted from one of the lessons in IMPROVE YOUR WRITING:  Ten Essential Tools for Streamlining Your Sentences, a self-paced online course facilitated by writer, teacher and former GLP Director Joan Dempsey. Joan employed the 8-Steps of Design in the creation of this course. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain […]

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What Good Are Warm Ups?

When I was in 9th grade I attended an encounter group weekend designed to get us teenagers more comfortable with ourselves. The first thing we did was a “warm-up” exercise so we could “get to know each other.” What did we do? We stood in a circle and passed an orange around the circle, not […]

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4 Simple Suggestions for Better Meetings

I’m the president of a non-profit board of trustees and before I took the helm our meetings were primarily show-and-tell sessions:  the director showed and told and we sat passively and listened, contributing ideas when we were asked. That was then.  Fast-forward to now. I remember the moment when, after months spent introducing some SUREFire […]

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The Art of Facilitation:  Time Management,  Learning Events,  and Culture

What follows is an excerpt from a longer article:  “Time Management,  Learning Events,  and Culture,”  by Jenny Giezendanner,  Certified Dialogue Education Practitioner.  The article is free and you can download it here to read the rest.     Rubber time in Indonesia,  mañana in Latin America,  the Pünktlichkeit of the Germanic – each characterizes a particular perception […]

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Educating from the Heart

When I was a kid,  about twelve years old,  I went to a YMCA special weekend called Inward Bound (the link isn’t to the same program,  but this one is close,  and looks great!). It was for kids all over the state and we learned about ourselves,  about how we’re all different,  and got some […]

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