Faith in the back seat

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Steve Mahaley

The other night my wife and I were out to get some Sunday dinner.  The events of the weekend having conspired to leave us little energy or food ready to cook, we set out to find something simple at a local restaurant.  That’s when we met Faith.

Turning the corner onto a 2-lane highway, there was a lady standing on the side of the road, shifting and looking nervously back and forth down the road.  Given the time of day (getting dark), location and weather, I pulled over and rolled the window down.

Faith grew up in New Jersey, and spent some time traveling in Europe.  She was at one faithpoint a model living in NYC, and she rattled off the names of ‘haute couture’ designers for whom she had worked.  She could speak a little French, as her mother-in-law was French – we had a good laugh about ‘merde, alors!’.

She raised four children, was divorced years ago, and went to school in Florida following a dream of becoming a lawyer.  Bills piled up and work was hard to find, and she quit school with $90,000 in student loans.

We drove past a house where she thought a friend might be, but the car wasn’t there.  She told us how she was working odd jobs, and was scared to death to get a full time job because the loan collectors would find her.  Her friend owed her five dollars, after partial payment for cleaning a room in the house.

We wound up at a local pizza joint – we were all hungry.  Faith gestured and scratched with the pattern of those under the influence.  I’m pretty sure she was a drug user.  And we had a conversation about history, politics, international culture and kids.  She said she’d probably vote for Trump in the upcoming election because we need a strong military and need to kick ISIS out of our country.

All of this just reminded me of how lucky I am (and we are), and also how much more we need to do to connect with those that are so often marginalized, so that we understand their reality – so that we empathize, and are more considerate in our thinking about those, including Faith, who might be standing in the cold.

 

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Soft Skills, Hard Results

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Steve Mahaley

This is a repost of something I wrote for work.  We often overlook the opportunities to structure follow-up and reconnection with participants after the ‘event’ of learning is done.   This is just a little story about that…

It was pretty early in my day.  I set my coffee maker up the night prior, with an early start of 05:30.   By 6:00, I was in my desk chair, at home, logging in to a webinar hosted from the other side of the world.

These leaders run businesses around the world – from cement factories to retail clothing to telecommunications services.  I sip my coffee and think back to what feels like ages ago – when we were all together in Mumbai, sharing stories, debating issues, gaining insights, and resolving to do something important – to make a difference.

It was actually only 3 months ago, and the time had gone by very quickly.  In today’s world, you blink and things change.  This is the reality that these business leaders face, and what’s fascinating for me is their sense of responsibility for the world around them.   It was this whirlwind of change that fueled much of our discussions together in Mumbai.   They were not only concerned about the performance of their various businesses (the ‘bottom line’), but also the well-being of their workforce, and of the larger communities in which they operate.

It won’t be news to anyone that has spent time working in that part of the world, but for those that haven’t, India is a fascinating, bustling, deeply culturally complex nation.  It is growing, in population and in business operations.   Much of India is still quite rural, with villages scattered around its vast land area.  And of course there are the giant urban areas of key cities.  In the outlying areas, however, the businesses that operate there often are the sole providers of employment.

I had quite a mix in the classroom.  Some had traveled from Canada to be in the room.  Others had come in from rural areas northeast of Mumbai.  Still others had arrived from  Indonesia and North Africa.  All of them were excited to have some time together, as is always the case – time to learn from each other, and learn more about themselves, as leaders.  We spent a good deal of time working on issues pertinent to the overall enterprise, including trends affecting the various businesses, natural resource shortages, environmental impacts, new hire attraction and retention, and local community stewardship.  These are heady issues.  They go beyond what we may think of as basic management skills.  This is really about helping these leaders be ready for what’s next – for them, their businesses, and the communities within which they operate.

It was time to start.  The presentation slides were in place.  Only 5 slides.  Mostly photos from when we were together to spur memories and hopefully a few smiles around the world.  The participating leaders arrived – each greeting the rest with gusto.  The lines were crackly and sometimes there were strange noises that sounded like an echo chamber.  But we got down to it – the last slide simply said “What have you achieved?”.

The program sponsor, a senior executive in the organization, was on the line, and gave a heartfelt message of pleasure to be rejoining this group.  As I opened the floor up to the participants, I saw the hands go up in the webinar.  I started in. It was great.  There were a number of stories told; some were about ongoing progress being made with new projects taken on.  Other stories were about issues that were uncovered, and requests for advice from others in the room.  Hands went up – it was easy to moderate.  Ideas were shared and the network established 3 months prior was put into action.

One particular story stands out.  As part of the design of this developmental  program, each of the leaders went through a 360 process.   Their results were conveyed to them by a qualified expert while we were together in Mumbai.  They had time, individually, to reflect, discuss and plan what steps they would take, given their results.  Notably, a number of participants needed to be more enabling and less authoritarian in their leadership style.

This one man, let’s call him S.P., he was quite affected by his scores and realized that his style in his team meetings was creating the very source of frustration that he’d been struggling with for so long.  His team was silent.  They never brought any ideas to the table.  He was constantly having to tell them what to do.

After receiving his 360 scores, discussing with our educator and with his peers, he decided to do something about it.  Each of the participants were asked to articulate 3 actions they were going to take at the end of the residential program, how they would know those actions were successful, and a general timeline for completing them.  His was really simple:  Open up his team meetings by doing a lot more listening, encouraging his team members to share ideas, and having them lead parts of the meetings.

As he relayed his story, others on the line affirmed that they, too, had similar results.  S.P.s were quite dramatic.  One of his team members had recently brought forth an innovative idea on how to improve a process within their workflow that is now saving the organization, by his calculation, over $10,000 every month.

It’s not a million-dollar idea.  But it is just one of potentially many more, and, more than the positive bottom line impact on the financial report, this shift in mindset and skillset towards ‘soft’ skills in leadership has created a sense of shared ownership and innovation, with clearly some ‘hard’ results.

I looked out the window after closing down the webinar.  The sun was out; time for another cup of coffee.

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Original post; August 24, 2015 @ http://www.dukece.com/soft-skills-hard-results/ 

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On Social Learning

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Steve Mahaley

I’m participating in a MOOC called Exploring Social Learning offered by some very kind folks out of the UK, and powered by a range of technologies, including HT2’s Curatr platform.

A discussion has sprung up there about the definition of social learning.  I tend to go back to my freely admitted preference for social constructivism as the most effective idea set for designing education.  I did some work around this some years back, and still appreciate the fine work of the late Dr. David Jonassen.  His focus, while on the notion of problem-solving generally, informs us today on the roles technology can play in enabling socially constructed meaning.

Here is the quoted text from Jonassen’s work, with some additional linking thoughts / references from me for each point:

Learning environments should emphasize the qualities below. That is, technologies should be used to keep students active, constructive, collaborative, intentional, complex, contextual, conversational, and reflective. What do these mean?

  • Active: Learners are engaged by the learning process in mindful processing of information where they are responsible for the result. In natural learning situations, learners and performers of all ages, without the intervention of formal instruction, can acquire sophisticated skills and advanced knowledge about what they are learning. For instance, before playing sandlot baseball, do kids subject themselves to lectures and multiple choice examinations about the theory of games, the aerodynamics of orbs, and vector forces. No! They start swinging the bat and chasing fly balls, and they negotiate the rules as they play the game. Through formal and informal apprenticeships and communities and play and work, learners develop skills and knowledge which they then share with other members of those communities with whom they learned and practiced those skills. In all of these situations, learners are actively manipulating the objects and tools of the trade and learning by reflecting on what they have done.
  • Constructive: Learners integrate new ideas with prior knowledge in order to make sense or make meaning or reconcile a discrepancy, curiosity, or puzzlement. They construct their own meaning for different phenomena. The models that they build to explain things are simple and unsophisticated at first, but with experience, support, and reflection, they become increasingly complex. As we explained earlier, we believe that it is impossible for learners to know what the teacher knows. They can only know what they know, so they should be supported in the process of coming to know.  (see also Lev Vygotsky and Social Constructivism -sm)
  • Collaborative: Learners naturally work in learning and knowledge building communities, exploiting each others skills while providing social support and modeling and observing the contributions of each member. Humans naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks. Why then do we in schools insist that learners “do their own work” and if they don’t, we accuse them of cheating. Individualized, reproductive methods of instruction cheat learners out of more natural and productive modes of thinking.   (also think of Bruce Tuckman’s stages of team work -sm)
  • Intentional: All human behavior is goal directed (Schank, 1994). That is, everything that we do is intended to fulfill some goal. That goal may be simple, like satiating hunger or getting more comfortable, or it may be more complex, like developing new career skills. When learners are actively and willfully trying to achieve a cognitive goal (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1993/1994), they think and learn more. Learning environments need to support learners in articulating what their goals are in any learning situation.  (also brings to mind Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs – sm)
  • Complex: The greatest intellectual sin that we teachers commit is to oversimplify most ideas in order to make them more easily transmittable to learners. In addition to stripping ideas out of their normal contexts, we distill ideas to their simplest form so that students will more readily learn them. But what are they learning?; that the world is a reliable and simple place. However, the world is not a reliable and simple place. Problems are multiple components and multiple perspectives and cannot be solved in predictable ways like the canned problems at the end of textbook chapters. We need to engage students in solving complex and ill-structured problems as well as simple problems. Unless learners are required to engage in higher order thinking, they will develop oversimplified views of the world.   (see Bloom’s taxonomy, too – sm)
  • Contextual: A great deal of recent research has shown that learning tasks that are situated in some meaningful real world task or simulated in some case-based or problem based learning environment are not only better understood, but also are more consistently transferred to new situations. Rather than abstracting ideas in rules that are memorized and then applied to other canned problems, we need to teach knowledge and skills in real life, useful contexts and providing new and different contexts for learners to practice using those ideas.   (consider simulations or game-based learning – sm)
  • Conversational: Learning is inherently a social, dialogical process (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996). That is, given a problem or task, people naturally seek out opinions and ideas form others. Technologies can support this conversational process by connecting learners across town or across the world. When learners become part of knowledge building communities both in class and outside of school, they learn that there are multiple ways of viewing the world and multiple solutions to most of life’s problems. (consider social networking – sm)
  • Reflective: Learners should be required by technology-based learning to articulate what they are doing, the decisions they make, the strategies they use, and the answers that they found. When they articulate what they have learned and reflect on the processes and decisions that were entailed by the process, they understand more and are better able to use the knowledge that they have constructed in new situations.  (consider webinar follow-up meetings – sm)
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