[Own Your Life Wed] Make It Happen ’19-’20

Recently I spoke at an education association who is at the forefront of creating and sustaining innovative and intellectually challenging schools.  

But before I get into what happened, let me preface this by saying that I’ve traveled the country speaking to over 20,000 people in a two year period.  I received evaluations at the end of every day and so I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback over the years about my audience engagement.  

I’m not telling you this to impress you but to give you a frame of reference about what I am going to share.   Advanced as we are technologically we are still inclined to approach the problematic areas in our places of work today from a place of waiting on someone else to fix it.  The #1 issue being the social-emotional problems that need to be, must be, solved beginning with the adults in charge – that is if you want to see productivity go up.

Back to my experience with an educational association whose mission statement is to be the forefront of innovative change.

I opened with one of my most engaging activities to get audience involvement right away. It is something I do deliberately to get a feel for what they already know so I don’t take them down a road they’ve already traveled.

As an professional development trainer, I always have a Plan A, B, C etc. depending on what an audience reveals about themselves within the first 10 minutes of our time together.

This activity is designed to get people to think beyond their current situations into the future they’d like to find long term solutions for.   In fact Step 2 of this process is to identify “How they’s prefer that it be” within each of the problematic areas they’ve already identified in Step 1.

When we got to this question, “How would you prefer that it be?” it was like looking at deer in the headlight.  No one raised their hand with a preference.  I encouraged them to reach for it in their minds.  I instructed them to think beyond what they thought was possible or realistic and get to the heart of what they’d really like to see happen in education.

Tick-tock-tick-tock.  Nothing.

Read what disconcerting thing happened next at my blog!