~ 1 ~
EDITORIAL: Active Reviewing Tips reaches 60
~ 2 ~ EVENTS: Active Reviewing
Workshops with Roger Greenaway
~ 3 ~ ARTICLE: Learning from Triumphs
and Disasters
~ 4 ~ GAME DESIGN: Agile Experiential
Learning
~ 5 ~ ARCHIVE: Turntaking Methods
~ 6 ~ PREVIOUS ISSUE and FUTURE
ISSUES
~ 7 ~ About Active Reviewing Tips
~ 1 ~ EDITORIAL: Active Reviewing
Tips reaches 60
Welcome to the 60th issue of Active Reviewing Tips -
which is now in its 16th year. That is an average of
just over 4 issues per year. Hopefully it is a
pleasant and welcome surprise when you discover that
Active Reviewing Tips is appearing in your inbox
again, waiting to assist and inspire you.
If you have ever tried to help a team learn from a
triumph or a disaster, this issue is for you.
Active
Reviewing Tips is a free
newsletter from Roger Greenaway that will
help you to re-charge your reviewing and
facilitation skills.
Typical contents:
- a practical feature on reviewing tips
- links to sites about active learning
methods
- tips, comments and ideas from readers
- what's new in the Guide to Active
Reviewing at http://reviewing.co.uk
Maximum frequency: monthly. Average
frequency: quarterly.
"16 years of
promoting better learning experiences
without chalk, flipcharts or marker
pens."
|
I welcome requests about topics for Active
Reviewing Tips and enquiries about trainer-training
workshops (open or in-house) from September
2014 onwards.
Roger Greenaway
roger@reviewing.co.uk
http://reviewing.co.uk
Don't
just
do it - actively review it!
~ 2 ~ EVENTS: Active Reviewing
Workshops with Roger Greenaway
DENMARK
11th
June,
Vejle.
Location: VINGSTED
Hotel
& Conference Centre
Moving Bodies -
Moving Minds: a toolkit for facilitators and
consultants
In this workshop you will be experiencing the
benefits of making abstract or complex ideas
visible, tangible and changeable. You will learn how
to use simple visual aids and tools that will help
your clients to express, examine and explore key
concepts and critical situations. The versatile
tools will help you to facilitate learning from
experience in ways that are inclusive, engaging and
dynamic. For a full description and event booking
details view
this page at eventsupport
Any questions? Contact Klaus
Jacobsen
CHINA
17-18th June 2014, Shanghai. How
to
Facilitate Learning From Experience. Open
train the trainer programme with Sino-Associates.
CHINA
19-20th June 2014, Shanghai. How
to
Transfer Learning for Lasting Impact. Open
train the trainer programme with Sino-Associates.
CHINA
26-27th June 2014 - 2 day workshop in Shenzhen
with Adventure
Base Consultancy or see this
Facebook
page
HONG KONG
28-29th June 2014 - 2 day workshop in Hong
Kong with Adventure
Base
consultancy or see this
Facebook
page
ROMANIA
18-19th July 2014, Bucharest,
Romania. For details see the course description at
the Institutal
Roman
de Training or send an email to Diana
Ghinda
MACAU
26-28th September 2014, Macau
(tbc. Includes open workshops)
TAIWAN
1-2nd October, Taipei,
Taiwan. Open workshop for Asia
Association
for Experiential Education (AAEE)
TAIWAN
4-5th October, Kaohsiung,
Taiwan. Open workshop for Asia
Association for Experiential Education (AAEE)
UK
17-18th October, Loughborough. I hope to be offering
a workshop at the IOL
National
Conference
More
trainer-training workshops
Later in 2014 I am hoping to return to Singapore and
Malaysia and provide open workshops in Hungary,
the Netherlands and in the UK (Devon).
The above information is copied from
The
Calendar of Reviewing Skills Training Workshops
where you will find the most up to date list of
open/public workshops provided by Roger Greenaway.
The
other
newsletter: the Experiential-CPD Calendar
The Experiential-CPD Calendar lists
'trainer-training' and 'educator-training' events
from several UK
providers. The events listed here are of
interest to facilitators who work indoors or
outdoors. The Experiential-CPD calendar features a
'Thought for the Month' about experiential
learning from the editors or from readers.
~ 3 ~ ARTICLE: Learning from
Triumphs and Disasters
Learning from Triumphs and Disasters
by
Roger
Greenaway, Reviewing Skills Training
A team has a "disaster": they fail at
their task and they are deflated. They clearly
have a lot to learn but they are feeling so down
that there is a clear risk that a review will
knock them down even further. What do you do as a
facilitator to help them learn from this
experience?
A team has a "triumph": it is their
biggest sense of achievement ever. They are in the
mood for celebration and there is a risk that any
critical reviewing will seem petty and of little
importance because the big story is their triumph.
What do you do as a facilitator to help them learn
from their success?
These two extreme cases can be quite
challenging if your goal is to facilitate
learning. Let's explore and evaluate some
potentially effective responses, so that you will
be better prepared if you should ever find
yourself in either of these situations. And if you
are better prepared for these extreme cases you
should also find that you are better equipped for
whatever happens in between these extremes.
Next you will find seven strategies
for learning from disasters. These are followed by
seven strategies for learning from triumphs. You
will find a quick evaluation of each strategy. I
then share some thoughts about whether or not we
should welcome triumphs and disasters or seek to
steer groups away from such experiences.
Learning from
Disasters
Let's look at what can happen when
trying to facilitate a review after a team
disaster ...
1
You spot ample opportunities for
learning from mistakes.
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The team performance is a
disaster. The constructions falls down.
The team falls apart. Everyone feels down.
You spot ample opportunities for learning
from mistakes. But you sense that spirits
are so low that looking at problems will
drive the mood down even lower. They might
say, "It was rubbish because we're
rubbish". "What kind of rubbish?" you ask.
And a dreary post-mortem begins. Everyone,
including you, wishes they were somewhere
else, and that "reviewing" had never been
invented.
|
2
You
smilingly declare that every cloud has a
silver lining.
|
There was so little new or
useful learning from this "post-mortem"
that it is no surprise that the team
follow up this disaster with another one.
This time you are determined to take a
more positive angle in the review. You
smilingly declare that every cloud has a
silver lining and you ask each person to
make a silver lining statement. "No-one
died" says the first person to speak. "We
go home in a couple of hours" says the
next. "We didn't give up straight away".
"We reached consensus that the task was
unachievable before giving up."
|
3
You give up
on reviewing and will try to set easier
tasks in future.
|
You conclude that it is
difficult to facilitate a review after a
disaster: talking about problems keeps
people going in a downward spiral, and
giving them encouragement to be positive
is unlikely to work if people are not
feeling positive. So you try to avoid this
situation by ensuring that the tasks you
set in future are not too difficult.
Perhaps it will be easier to review tasks
with more mixed outcomes?
|
But perhaps there are good
ways of reviewing disasters? - the full
article describes 7 strategies
for facilitating a review following a team
disaster.
Learning from
Triumphs
Let's look at what can happen when
trying to facilitate a review after a team triumph
...
1
You start
picking holes (or nits) - in search of
even better excellence.
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The team performance is
excellent (and it was a good experience
for everyone involved). You think of your
job as helping them to produce an even
better performance. So you ask about how
they can improve ... which leads to people
getting criticised for tiny things of
little importance and the mood becomes
negative and defensive: no-one feels that
they are learning anything of value and
you start to feel alienated as
hole-picker-in-chief.
|
2
You join in
the high five celebrations.
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So next time the team
performance is excellent, you decide to
celebrate. And you do and there are
congratulations and high fives all around.
People even do replays of the best bits.
People feel even better about their
success but have they learned anything
more as a result of celebrating the best
bits?
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3
You set
impossible challenges so that no team
can triumph.
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You conclude that it is
difficult to review a team success because
any attempt to be critical seems like
trivial nit-picking, and there is a risk
that too much celebrating creates
complacency. So you try to avoid this
situation by ensuring that the level of
challenge is so high in future tasks that
no team will ever feel 100% successful!
|
But surely it is possible to learn
from team success? How else do successful teams
get better? The full
article describes 7 strategies for
facilitating a review following a team
triumph.
The full article on "Learning from
Triumphs and Disasters" describes a total of 14
facilitation strategies for helping teams reflect
in these extreme situations. Download
the
full article now or keep your fingers
crossed that the teams you work with will always
be moderately successful. ;-)
For
the Italian translation of 'Triumphs and Disasters'
register at Training-Esperienziale.it
You may also like to see Shirley Gaston's article
on:
5
practical ways to help your team learn effectively
from failure
~ 4 ~ GAME DESIGN: Agile
Experiential Learning
I recently attended the Agile Games conference in
Boston, New England. It was my second time sharing
ideas at Agile Games with this amazing community
dedicated to collaboration and experiential
learning in the workplace.
The
conference
attracted many experts in the design of learning
games: one group devised 5 new games in less than
5 hours. In another part of the conference 5
people facilitated the playing of the games that
they had designed and that had won them each a
free place at the conference.
All
of
these games will probably continue on their
journey of development as they get tried out,
tweaked, shared and adapted in this community that
is dedicated to continuous improvement. And they
apply the same principles to team development: "At
regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly."
Their
belief
in teams is so strong that they assert that: "The
best [work] emerges from self-organizing teams."
They are fans of emergent learning: they value
"Responding to change over following a plan".
They
are
also very keen on face-to-face communication in
the workplace: "The most efficient and effective
method of conveying information to and within a
... team is face-to-face conversation". Any
lingering stereotypes I may have had about IT
software developers have now completely vanished.
Agile
Games
brings together some of the most creative people
in the world of software development. And what is
most astonishing to me is that these innovative
practices do not come from research institutions
or training events but from and in the workplace.
The amount of learning and development and
productivity that comes from a well functioning
Agile team would, I suspect, make off-site team
development redundant.
Quotes above are from http://agilemanifesto.org
These reflections on Agile Games first appeared in
the Experiential-CPD
Calendar.
~ 5 ~ ARCHIVE: Turntaking Methods
A group has just
completed an activity or a real-world project.
Your job is to help them reflect and learn from
their experiences. What turn-taking strategy will
you use?
DO YOU MAKE ANY OF
THESE FOUR MISTAKES?
-
Not having a
turn-taking strategy. 'Laissez-faire'
is very unfair especially when it results in
domination by the loudest people.
-
Adopting your
usual 'default mode' (which you might spot
somewhere below) without considering other
turn-taking strategies.
-
Imposing a
turn-taking method on the group that is either
too structured (and lifeless) or one that is
too jolly (and superficial).
-
Not making room
for participation - by talking too much,
getting in the first word, taking all the best
lines, filling in the silences, and only
asking for participation when you run out of
breath.
AN EVALUATION OF
TURN-TAKING METHODS
No method is perfect.
What follows is a list of turn-taking options with
comments about the strengths and weaknesses of
each. Methods with lots of minuses are best
avoided, or used sparingly.
This article was
published in Active Reviewing Tips 5 years ago.
You can read the full article here.
~ 6 ~ PREVIOUS ISSUE and FUTURE
ISSUES
The previous issue of Active Reviewing Tips is
archived at
this
address.
Topics under consideration for future issues
include:
- Reviewing in twos (as a break from whole group
reviewing)
- Making the case for active reviewing
- Making reviewing a memorable experience
- Reviewing as a takeaway skill for participants
- Evaluating Active Reviewing: how well does it
work?
- Reviewing for different outcomes (using the
same activities)
- End of programme reviews
- Co-facilitating reviews
- The art of improvising
- Remote Reviewing
- Reviewing over a cup of tea (informal
reviewing)
- Readers' Questions about Reviewing (please
feed me with questions for this 'FAQ')
- Sample designs for learning and development
- Integrated practice in experiential learning
(when does an activity become a review? when
does a review become an activity? examples of
integrated practice - and do these
challenge or demonstrate experiential learning
theory?)
Please write to roger@reviewing.co.uk
if you have any topics you would like to see
included or put at the top of this list (which is
not yet in any particular order).
~ 7 ~ About Active Reviewing Tips
TITLE: Active Reviewing Tips for Dynamic
Experiential Learning
ISSN: 1465-8046
EDITOR: Dr. Roger Greenaway, Reviewing Skills
Training
EMAIL: roger@reviewing.co.uk
Feedback welcome - especially about this new
format.
ARCHIVES: Index
of
back issues
HOME PAGE: Active
Reviewing
PRIVACY: see foot of page
"I like the way
you look at everything and then return to what is
simple, effective and memorable."
"You always have material I don't want to miss."
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