Category: engagement

Patrick Lambe on Against Bestness

Photograph of yellow warning signsthat says "water over roadway" and "dead end" surrounded by flood waters. Clouds and trees reflected on the water.


In 2008 Patrick Lambe wrote this fabulous blog post challenging our notion of, or perhaps obsession with, bestness. Green Chameleon » Against Bestness

First, I encourage you to read the whole post. It is still spot on resonant. Patrick highlights many of the missteps of trying to focus on all things best: best practices, simplistic taxonomies, etc. 

Why do we fall for bestness? For me, it is our own entrained thinking and simply not paying attention to the signals where a focus on best is, at best (haha) is a wrong turn.

Second, I’d love you to share the signals you notice when you (if you ever do) start focusing on bestness instead of the right thing to do right now. (Or some variation.)

In taking a step back from constant work, I’m reflecting on some of my choices with groups and clients and see moments where I have consciously or unconsciously not heard what others offer because I thought I had what was best.  Signals? Defensiveness. Interrupting others. Prioritizing the voices that agreed with me. 

My antidote? Stick with structures that prevent behavior that I succumbed to now and again. This is probably why I use Liberating Structures, or at the least, consider my process choices based on how much the bring all voices to the work. 

 

Unearthing 2008 drafts: Pen Pals in Prague

In 1968 my dad made friends at work with a man from Czechoslovakia. It turns out Jan and his wife Kveta had escaped their country on the eve of the Soviet take-over, leaving everything behind. Our family became friends with them and one day they asked me if I would like a pen-pal in Czechoslovakia. Always interested in other countries, I said yes.

Thus began a long term correspondence between Daniela Benesova of Prague and I. On October 11th, 2008, 40 years after the initiation of this relationship, we met face to face outside a metro stop. We had not seen pictures of each other for many years, but we instantly recognized each other, seeing the young girl in each others’ 50 year old faces. After a big hug, a day of re-meeting, renewing and reviewing a friendship began as Daniela showed me around her home town.

I wonder why I did not post this when I wrote it so many years ago. Maybe because the rest of the trip was challenging and mind blowing (Israel and Palestine) and this post never got published. Maybe it was to discover it again to day and write to Daniela…

Reflective ripples and learning

From the draft posts I’m mining, I reread a fantastic 2008 post by Konrad Glogowski on his blog, Towards Reflective BlogTalk.

Remember blogs? Well, even if folks no longer blog per se, there is still a lot of writing we put out on the interwebs.

I was taken by his description of a reflective process he developed for his 8th grade students and their blogging. As I read it back in 2008, I immediately put his ideas into this stewpot of “5 minute reflective practices” I had had simmering in the back of my brain. I thought what Konrad wrote about could be used in teams and communities of practice, as well as in classrooms. With a few adjustments, it might be a very fine tool. This idea of “ripples” is very powerful.

Konrad wrote:

It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas.

You’ll need to go read the full post for the method. He links to his worksheet here.

All these years later, reflective practices remain useful and at the core of my process repertoire. Currently Keith McCandless and I are working on a draft of a new Liberating Structure (Strategic Knotworking) and we both feel strongly that evaluation should be woven into work from the start, not just at the end. I suggested that this is a form of reflective practice. I turn often these days to the work of the fine folks building the field of Developmental Evaluation (Michael Quinn Patton and many others), and to the work of Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner and their Value Creation Framework and subsequent book, Learning to Make a Difference.

Yes, it is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement…

Tom Haskins on our Inner Teacher

In 2008 this blog post, growing changing learning creating: Relying on inner teachers, from Tom Haskin’s caught my eye enough to cause me to save the URL in a draft post. Revisiting it today, it still has resonance, but far beyond the classroom teaching context of the post itself. Please, after scanning the snippet below, go read the full post. Substitute what ever domain is yours for Tom’s as a classroom teacher.

Dawn on Skagit Bay, with Ika Island in the foreground and reflections on the tidal flatlands.

While blogging for the past year on related topics, I’ve come to the following realizations about the nature of a compounding solution in education:

  1. When we assume each student has an inner teacher within their minds, we will stop interfering with the discovery, cultivation and trust building with that inner teacher. The inner teacher will come to the fore of the students learning experiences and and reconfigure how they picture learning occurring. Problems with a particular learning challenge or patterns of learning efforts will get worked out between the student and the inner teacher who already knows what the underlying problems are.

As I read Tom’s words they resonate for me as a practitioner of Liberating Structures and more generally as a process person who deeply values learning, reflection and action. How do Tom’s words resonate for you?

Thanks, Tom!

(I’m having fun going through the detritus of draft blog posts!)

Not another “how are you?” Alternatives from Kat Vellos

Brilliance from Kat Vellos https://www.instagram.com/katvellos_author/ and https://twitter.com/KatVellos/status/1392606023718825986/photo/1 (Her blog post about it here.)

I think I now sleepwalk through someone asking/answering “how are you.” That said, sometimes I’d love a meeting where I can skip ALL check-ins, check-outs and just get the work done and the meeting OVER WITH. This is a unique kind of pandemic-induced fatigue for me. I seek not the gathering place on some days, but the cave.

Interesting…