Paul Z Jackson is an old friend, a co-founder of the Applied Improvisation Network and one of the men who first helped me learn about learning.
He also blogs and in a recent blog he brought up an issue he had with facilitators who ask a question and then repeat it by adding the word 'really' to it.
He argues that adding the 'really' is tantamount to saying that we don't believe the first answer.
Another friend from AIN is Johnnie Moore. He blogged his reply. He recognized this as a trap that facilitators often fall into. When we are looking for an answer different to the one that the participants give, we push to get that answer from them.
Both of these are very valid points of view. And I would like to add a third idea to this from an experience I had that I found deeply engaging and very powerful.
At a conference several years ago I attended a session by Win Wenger. The session was on the Socratic method and Win modeled this by speaking for a total of less than 45 minutes in a whole day pre-conference.
We all had workbooks and he asked us to write in our workbook something that we could do that would make us a better trainer. We had about 5 minutes for that and when the time was up he gave us our next assignment. To write in our workbook something that we could do that would make us a better trainer. Yup exactly the same brief as before. But he added that this time he wanted us to not include anything we wrote the first time.
We had about 5 minutes for that and when the time was up he gave us our next assignment. Can you guess what that assignment was? Yup. To write in our workbook something that we could do that would make us a better trainer. Again not including things we had already written.
It forced us to go beyond the obvious, beyond the simple and, in what I suspect Paul would call an emergent way, I ended up building on ideas that I had had earlier but not been able to articulate. In Improv terms I 'Yes-And'ed myself.
To me, the point that differentiates this from the 'really' conversation above is that this was private rather than public. The only sharing we did was at the end of the exercise on how effective it had been and if we had anything we wanted to share that came out of our writing.
By keeping it private, Win stepped back from the role of someone controlling our (internal) conversation and instead prodded us to validate and push further.
I've said before in this blog that our job as Learning Professionals is to get out of the way of the learners doing the learning.
That is what 'really' matters
Happy Learning
Alan
He also blogs and in a recent blog he brought up an issue he had with facilitators who ask a question and then repeat it by adding the word 'really' to it.
He argues that adding the 'really' is tantamount to saying that we don't believe the first answer.
Another friend from AIN is Johnnie Moore. He blogged his reply. He recognized this as a trap that facilitators often fall into. When we are looking for an answer different to the one that the participants give, we push to get that answer from them.
Both of these are very valid points of view. And I would like to add a third idea to this from an experience I had that I found deeply engaging and very powerful.
At a conference several years ago I attended a session by Win Wenger. The session was on the Socratic method and Win modeled this by speaking for a total of less than 45 minutes in a whole day pre-conference.
We all had workbooks and he asked us to write in our workbook something that we could do that would make us a better trainer. We had about 5 minutes for that and when the time was up he gave us our next assignment. To write in our workbook something that we could do that would make us a better trainer. Yup exactly the same brief as before. But he added that this time he wanted us to not include anything we wrote the first time.
We had about 5 minutes for that and when the time was up he gave us our next assignment. Can you guess what that assignment was? Yup. To write in our workbook something that we could do that would make us a better trainer. Again not including things we had already written.
It forced us to go beyond the obvious, beyond the simple and, in what I suspect Paul would call an emergent way, I ended up building on ideas that I had had earlier but not been able to articulate. In Improv terms I 'Yes-And'ed myself.
To me, the point that differentiates this from the 'really' conversation above is that this was private rather than public. The only sharing we did was at the end of the exercise on how effective it had been and if we had anything we wanted to share that came out of our writing.
By keeping it private, Win stepped back from the role of someone controlling our (internal) conversation and instead prodded us to validate and push further.
I've said before in this blog that our job as Learning Professionals is to get out of the way of the learners doing the learning.
That is what 'really' matters
Happy Learning
Alan
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