Tag: UdGAgora

Choices in Learning and Teaching: More Humane? More Engaging?

Last week I blogged a little piece on the power of inviting a human being into a learning or doing experience. The human side of it. Today I finally read the post from Ryan Tracey that a number of folks have mentioned, Collateral damage | E-Learning Provocateur.

Ryan, after acknowledging the lack of evidence that supports the theory or learning styles (yay!), brings some nuance into the conversation and tackles the contextual issues around learner preferences.

If someone is in a classroom or a job-mandated training session, they will take what you give them. They may not be happy, but the in-room environment creates more pressure to conform.

In independent, self-driven learning, we hew more to our own personal preferences. Like Ryan, I cringe when I have to learn through videos, not just because so many are bad, but I’m a fast reader and can pinpoint what I want more efficiently. I certainly CAN learn with videos, I just prefer NOT to.

Creating a space for choice seems a pretty humane thing to do. I am more likely to follow through, to say YES, if you give me the respect as an adult learner and, where practical, some choice. I’ve observed this increases engagement over time (mine and others’). I wonder if there is any data to support this?

I think back to the JIBC/UdG Guadalajara group last month and even the conversations around Adroid vs. IOS, even without their religious zeal, reflect that driving impulse to have some level of choice, both as instructors/teachers/trainers and as learners.

P.S. I enjoyed the images in Ryan’s post as well!

P.S.S. The network and Ryan have circled back and now we know the image is the work of  Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com – Allie, your work rocks!

The Power of Ordinary Practices – Quotes Worth Amplifying

Well, this seems to be a fitting follow up to my last blog post.

Amabile: I believe it’s important for leaders to understand the power of ordinary practices. Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous impact. My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have. That’s particularly true of the negative behaviors. I don’t think that the ineffective team leaders we studied meant to anger or deflate the people who were working for them. They were trying to do a good job of leading their teams, but lacked an effective model for how to behave.

So, I would say sweat the small stuff, not only when you’re dealing with your business strategy, but with the people whom you’re trying to lead. I would encourage leaders, when they’re about to have an interaction with somebody, to ask themselves: Might this thing I’m about to do or say become this person’s “event of the day”? Will it have a positive or a negative effect on their feelings and on their performance today?codrawing2

Amabile also calls out the rich, internal emotional lives that we all have, and how that influences our working together and collaboration.

One, people have incredibly rich, intense, daily inner work lives; emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment permeate their daily experience at work. Second, these feelings powerfully affect people’s day-to-day performance. And third, those feelings, which are so important for performance, are powerfully influenced by particular daily events.

This again has resonance with last week’s #UdGAgora work where we explored the role of empathy in course design. The red threads are really showing up today. Maybe this will help me start pulling together a full post about The Agora. Alan has already started the “reflective ball” rolling.
Source: The Power of Ordinary Practices — HBS Working Knowledge

Hospital checklists and Inviting Participation

5429335563_ebe9be20dcJohnnie Moore pointed to an interesting article on why checklists don’t always produce the kind of positive results expected in hospital operating rooms.

I remember a few years back when I had major surgery. I had been rolled into the operating room. I was looking around and I commented on the team’s use of a checklist. They looked at me, surprised that I noticed. I said I’m interested in group process. With that, they gave me my anesthesia. I think one of the things on the list was to shut up talkative patients. 🙂 But I wondered, did the checklist make a difference for that team? It seemed like they were comfortable and well-practiced…

Outside of hospital operating rooms, where I have no expertise other than as patient, I’m fascinated by what sort of invitation gets people to engage with tools that can increase their individual and collective performance. It seems to me the invitation is as important as the checklist. Here is a related snippet from the article:

Dixon-Woods did identify one exemplary ICU, in which a high infection rate fell to zero after Matching Michigan began. The unit was led by a charismatic physician who championed the checklist and rallied others around it. “He formed coalitions with his colleagues so everyone was singing the same tune, and they just committed as a whole unit to getting this problem under control,” says Dixon-Woods.

I don’t think the intention here is blind lock-step and I cringed a bit at “singing the same tune.” What I do think matters is that people understand the value of something they are asked to do, and that leadership walks the talk. That starts with an informed, intelligent invitation to participate. Not blind obedience. Not “because you have to.” And the ability to critically question an invitation, checklist or whatever, because in complex settings, not everything is predictable.

I’m currently reflecting on the last two weeks where a team of us co-facilitated 2 rounds of a week long learning experience for professors at the University of Guadalajara system in Mexico. (More to come on that.) I suspect where we created warm, intelligent INVITATIONS to experiment with mobile technologies for engaged teaching and learning, we had more professors “accept,” dive in and learn. Where we focused too much on content, we started to lose people. Interesting, eh?

Source: Hospital checklists are meant to save lives — so why do they often fail? : Nature News & Comment

Confusiasm/Confusiasmo at the UdGAgora

Many years ago at a KM4Dev community meeting, Carl Jackson coined the word “confusiasm,” a combination of confusion and enthusiasm. This has become a way of being for me. It represents, quite simply, learning in action.

We used this concept at the University of Guadalajara Diplomate program on mobile tech for engagement the last two weeks in Guadalajara with the Agora project. There is much more I want to write, but at the minimum, I want to start curating and sharing the artifacts. Here is the first one, a Storify of the Confusiasm Twitter thread. (Edited 2/3/2020 – link is dead because Storify is dead. 🙁 )

https://storify.com/NancyWhite/confusiasm-confusiasmo-at-the-udgagora