Facilitative Skills for Collaborative Leaders with Donna Ching

On Jan. 10-11th, 2013 I attended Donna Ching’s Facilitative Skills for Collaborative Leaders workshop. It was absolutely worth it! and by far one of the most productive and influential workshops I have attended that I can directly apply to my profession. The content covered will benefit my personal growth, management, and work ethics. I’ve come to realize that the process for planning a meeting comes with experience, but also knowing the proper tools to use. From Donna’s experience and the mana’o she shared, proper meeting facilitation should include the following:

Gathering expectations prior to the meeting
Being on time
Having an agenda
Proper introductions
Setting ground rules
Having and communicating the purpose
Staying impartial as a facilitator
Legitimizing comments or contributions
Redirecting participants
Brainstorming, clustering, and decision making
Capturing the group’s comments through the group memory board, which is gathered by a recorder.

Donna had a way of making all participants feel safe. Some strategies she used were snow cards, keeping the group close together when sitting (no energy holes), addressing criticism from the very beginning, and frequently legitimizing participants. Over the course of the two days, I became more and more confident to participate and took advantage of the opportunities she provided for the class to practice facilitator and recorder roles. She definitely equipped me for the next meeting I attend.

I look forward to attending another workshop and applying the skills I learned to my job to promote a collaborative work environment.

Donna shared an article with the class (Collaborative Leadership for Building Trust & Driving Business Results), which can be found at the link below:

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/trainingindustry/tiq_2013winter/#/22

A Hui Hou for now,

Jenny Tanaka

Comments

Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event. When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future . Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts , there are online classes everywhere. The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge. **Note: All icons link to the affiliated website. Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list

Geotagging

A "wouldn't it be nice" idea that's been around a while is the ability to tag a map with images that are linked to more information about the site. Kelly C suggested it as a way for students to share knowledge about a cultural/historic site or the geographic area they live in with classmates. (right, no addresses!) There are now cameras and even storage media that embed latitude and longitude into images as they are shot. But you don't need fancy new toys to do this. I tried Flickr's geotagging map and it's fun and supereasy. Want to try it? Log in to Flickr http://www.flickr.com Sign in as " techedine " password " wist101 " yea, corny. Click the " You " tab then the " Your Photostream > Map " or Organize > Your Map links. Click the Satellite link in the upper right. Cool view! (you may need Google Satellite downloaded). Images along the bottom of the screen with colored dots have already been droppe

Zoho Creator

I thought I’d share this web application I came across in my quest to find a relatively simple app to help us manage our mentoring data in the DL Orientation. Our specific needs were that it be a free online database, password protected, had the capability of rapid form development without too much programming knowledge and was easy for the end user to use. The application that met these requirements was Zoho Creator ( http://www.zohocreator.com/ ) a part of a suite of online applications including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, wikis, organizers and more. What’s great about Zoho Creator is that they have an online repository of applications already developed that you can download to your account and use for free. Initially, I tried some of these applications, but it was overkill for our needs. Zoho Creator can do a lot if you know programming and they have a pay model where it allows you more flexibility and features. I think Zoho Creator would be a useful tool for both

Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning (KSDL) Owau

Search This Blog