TV shows, self-help gurus, car salespeople, and yoga certification courses all offer bonus content of one kind or other. Behind the scenes footage. 5 steps to greatness in a handy PDF. Tinted windows. Advanced yoga poses DVD. When it comes to experiences, especially those where we are enrolled to learn…
Browsing Category Education
Learning Styles: 3D Mapping a Conversation
One of the learnings from being a student again has been around my own learning style. Other than a few short courses and MOOCs I haven’t done much classroom-based work since university – and that was nearly 15 years ago. The delicious irony here is that much of my work…
Signposts and Surprises
One of the principles of adult education is that adult learners like to know what’s going to be happening next. As facilitators and teachers we’ll usually do this by signposting in some way: an agenda at the beginning of the day, or a nod to the hands-on activity we’ll be…
Cultivate your questions carefully
Last week I went on a training course. In these situations I tend to be either very engaged or very agitated. As this course was well designed and facilitated, I found myself highly engaged and time flew by. There was just one occasion where I felt out of sync. A…
The two workshop danger zones
A few years ago, researchers from Ben Gurion and Columbia universities examined over 1,000 decisions made by Israeli judges who ruled on convicts’ parole requests. At the beginning of the day, the judges granted 65% of the parole requests. As lunchtime loomed, the approval rate dropped to almost zero. After lunch,…
Dress Up, Dress Down.
Since 2015 I’ve been a workshop facilitator and teacher serving all sorts of groups: teenagers, graduates, mid level managers, senior directors, and C-suite executives. Many of the larger sessions I’ve done have been 2 day bootcamps. Sometimes they’re for members of one company, other times they’re open to anyone who…
Question time: Getting booked to speak at conferences
A question (and often frustration) I hear pretty regularly is how to get booked at conferences as a speaker. There are a few answers to this. There are also a few ways of looking at the question that may be helpful. Here are two of them. First, let’s draw a…
Gateway Drugs
Let’s start at happy hour, the mixer, the meetup. You show up and contribute. Through a conversation, an idea, a question, a connection, an act of generosity. The happy hour may lead to a blog post, a workshop, or a chance to share some work in the wild. The post…
Stand Up if…
Connecting people isn’t so much of a problem anymore. The internet enables just about anyone to connect with anyone else. The problem now is more around finding, filtering, aligning. The problem appears it’s getting people to Stand Up If. Stand up if you want to work at a non profit….
Study Skills: The Reading Mesh
At the edges of Manhattan’s East Village are a cluster of student residence halls for New York University, more commonly known as NYU. Drop into any coffee shop within a few blocks of these and you’ll be sure to see a scattering of students hunched over laptops and working through…