Category: engagement

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…

Hey Networks! Don't underestimate relationship

In strolling through the archives of unpublished blogs posts, I came upon one which was simply a link to a great blog post from the Interaction Institute in 2017. And boom, it is still resonant today.

Network members making sense of their own data…

The wonderful author, Curtis Ogden, offered 10 principles for thinking like a network. I want to pull out a few things in each one to share with folks in some projects I’m working on. So why not share it here too? This is dynamically incomplete… be forewarned!

The groups I have been and am working with are quite different in some ways. One is an internal organization. Another is a tripartite collaboration that is ready to grow into a network. A third is a group that has done amazing F2F training and capacity building and has had to regroup in a COVID-Virtual world. All three, however, are motivated to act their way into their purposes in new ways. So first is the mindset and practices. In a later blog post I want to explore snap-back, the falling back into our old ways of being and doing.

Curtis’ intro to the article is great context:

Over the past several years of supporting networks for social change, we at IISC have been constantly evolving our understanding of what is new and different when we call something a network, as opposed to a coalition, collaborative or alliance. On the surface, much can look the same, and one might also say that coalitions, collaboratives and alliances are simply different forms of networks. While this is true, it is also the case that not every collaborative form maximizes network effects, including small world reach, rapid dissemination, adaptability, resilience and system change. In this regard, experience shows that a big difference maker is when participants in a network (or an organization, for that matter) embrace new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing. 

https://interactioninstitute.org/thinking-like-a-network-2-0/

I think we all confound different forms of collaboration, try to be all things to all people and then we are frustrated when our ambitions are cut short. Working in new ways requires two things: discernment about what is possible, and a repertoire to make the possible real. I think these principles from Curtis support both these things. I encourage you to read the original article, because below I’m short cutting into some specifics.

Adaptability instead of control

This shows up so strongly in “strategic planning.” We tend to equate a detailed, task descriptive plan as a proxy for strategic action, especially in grand funded projects where plans, and executing on the plans, are key points for accountability. Yet, most work these days is in complex and changing contexts. Can we shift to adaptive planning which defines the purpose, direction and then iterates forward with strong accountability during, not just at the end?

Contribution before credentials

Equity has been in so many conversations. What seems to constantly block equity and its precursor, access, is that we continue to worship at the alter of credentialed expertise, rather than tapping all kinds of expertise. Whoops, look at the word “tapping!” We have extractive approaches to knowledge generation. How do we move to more contribution versus extraction that honors all, regardless of the title certain parts of society wish to attach to some and not others?

Giving first, not taking

See above about extractive mindsets!

Resilience and redundancy instead of rock-stardom

See above regarding stepping away from single views of expertise for the rock stardom stuff, but the resilience and redundancy needs a post of its own. The practice-based approach I’ve been working on for this is that we backfill for each other across departments, organizations, networks. No one these days can afford to hire all the skills they need at any one time. Trading labor across our networks builds redundancy and a sense of mutual support. There is a limit to this — we can’t keep ADDING work without taking something away.

Diversity and divergence rather than the usual suspects and forced agreement

This is why we work in networks!

 Intricacy and flow not bottlenecks and hoarding

I struggled with this one until I went back and read Curtis’ words on this one. The word that emerges for me is abundance. (In all senses of the word, including mindset.)

I’m running out of steam, so I’ll leave the last four for YOU to flesh out, annotate, expound upon. If I leave this as a draft for another year… well, you know what happens!

Self-organization and emergence rather than permission and the pursuit of perfection

Shift focus from core to the periphery

From working in isolation to working with others and/or out loud

 From “Who’s the Leader?” to “We’re the Leaders!”

Artifacts from the KM4Dev Session on Peer Assistance

Note: My threat/promise to blog weekly has suffered a bit. I’ll try harder! What do you want me to blog about? Tell me in the comments.

A few weeks ago I wrote a provocation on Peer Assistance and Mutual Support in preparation for a KM4Dev Knowledge Cafe. I really enjoyed thinking more deeply about the power dynamics of peer assistance. Thanks to the great KM4Dev team here are the artifacts from the event. ‘