Coming About

Today, I will be recording a podcast of my digital storytelling workshop experience and what I learned from it with colleagues Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl in the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU. My story, A Teacher’s Journey, was created during a five-week workshop with eight other faculty members. Sometime during those five Fridays in September, I remember thinking about a concept that I was first exposed to in Dee Fink’s book on creating significant learning experiences–the concept of “flow.”

Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (prounounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”, according to Wikipedia), describes a flow as

a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation…the flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.

I can think of no better description to describe the joy that I experienced when I immersed myself in the world of Flickr photos, freely available, open source music and the experience of condensing 27 years of working with adult learners into a 300-word story produced with a simple editor such as PhotoStory.

For hours at a time, I was lost in my own world, remembering the faces of years past, re-experiencing the places and people of my personal history with a vividness that I haven’t felt in years. Hours melted away at my fingertips, and only the call of pressing University responsibilities and the students of TODAY brought me back to reality. The time I spent evaporated into pleasurable recollections and the joy of new insights. It felt as if I was learning anew all the lessons of my past within the wisdom of the present.

Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s, studied at the University of Chicago and later became head of the Department of Psychology there. His concept of flow is related to his research on the various states of mind we humans experience. The flow state is considered an optimally motivating, engaging situation, which all of us have experienced at times — one that most of us wish happened more often.

Csíkszentmihályi described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

To achieve this extraordinary state, which can happen for all of us, a balance must occur between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. When the task is either too easy or too difficult, flow does not occur. Flow occurs only when there is a match between skill level and the task requirements.

Isn’t this the very challenge a teacher faces with each and every assignment or activity? How to create learning experiences that engage us fully, challenging us to ever higher levels of performance? I know that this experience of digital storytelling is what I will have in mind when I think of engaging our learners to push the boundaries of their skills to their maximum potential as they challenge themselves in aquiring new knowledge and skill. Thank you, Bud Deihl, for the opportunity to learn how creative an activity this can be. I hope I can re-create the same for my learners!

Credits:
A Teacher’s Journey - Terry Carter
Wikipedia, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the photo describing “flow”

For the past two weeks, I’ve had the special experience of being involved in a Digital Storytelling Workshop sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU. Nine faculty members have committed five Friday afternoons to learning the art and craft of storytelling using digital media.  I first became intrigued by this possibility after attending a conference session at the Educause Learning Initiative on digital storytelling last January led by librarians from Ohio State. They showed us how, using still images, a very compelling story can be told using just 300 or 400 words and a host of freely available images (from Flickr and other sources) and music.  From the start, I’ve envisioned this as an alternative strategy for the traditional end-of-semester reflective essay or integrative learning paper.  What better way to reflect on the learning during an entire course or program by synthesizing the experience into a few powerful images and sounds?  So, I’m in this workshop to learn the “ins and outs” of doing it so I can then help our students learn how to create their own stories that reflect on their learning experiences.

Our facilitator is modeling this process very convincingly by reflecting our on Friday sessions with a newly created digital story of his own each week to capture the learning that occurred and his own sense of meaning-making about it.  Here’s Bud Deihl’s reflection for our session last Friday in which we held a “story circle” for each faculty member to give voice to a tentative idea to a story for the workshop.  It was a wonderful two hours of sharing about our practices as teachers, full of insights into the personal experiences of faculty as they recounted learning about learning.  There will be more to share on this topic as I continue to develop my own story to share.

 Video Credits: Story Circle by Bud Deihl, 1LifelongLearner

Dear Reader:  This post was first written in June, 2009, then put on “hold” while I finished other projects. I was searching for a way to explain what educators in the M.Ed. in Adult Learning program learn, and how they say they have changed. I have, at last, simply decided to use their words. So, here is the original post, and, at the end, a postscript on my tomatoes.

Just Add Water.

I was going to title this post, “Fertilizer,” then realized what sort of atrocious spam it might spur from my header (but I might get that anyway).  Also, I don’t know yet whether fertilizer is the key to remedy the yellowing leaves on my exciting new cherry tomato plants … see the photo of my potted tomatoes on the deck? Lots of flowers and, if you look carefully, the first fruit of my harvest in those tiny little green orbs.  But what has me concerned are the yellowing leaves as the base of the plant. At first there were just a few, but now it seems to me as if the whole plant has a slightly yellow cast.

I went to the computer and Googled my concerns to find similar queries and investigate what other gardeners were trying. You see, this is a new foray for me into vegetable gardening in containers, as I’m a floriculture person, and always have been big into flowering plants. These are my deck pots and hanging baskets overflowing with salmon-pink petunias and lavender blue verbena. This time of year I spend my early mornings watering.

My search brought up pages and pages devoted to yellowing tomato plant leaves … hmmm…. really a big problem, it seems. It could be the type of pot I’ve chosen, plastic (cost was a factor here), as the giant terra cotta ones carry a helfy price tag and I was already spent-out for the summer on plants and plant supplies when I indulged in a secret fantasy I’ve had for two years now to grow my own cherry tomatos. I picked up two little “Sweet 100″ plants at Ukrops in mid-May, and then had to go buy all the rest of the needed supplies, but didn’t want to invest in heavy, expensive pots. Looks like I may need to re-think that for next year! Of course plastic containers, even 14 or 16-inch ones, don’t breath like terra cotta. Maybe my roots are just too hot and pot-bound.

Or, and this appears more likely from my reading, it’s a mineral deficiency. I had enough plant knowledge to already consider this, so I watered thoroughly again yesterday with my newly acquired bottle of organic fertilizer composed of rather ghastly smelling seaweed and fish extracts.–a brown, smelly goop.  I was headed for my trusty Miracle-Gro when the lady at the garden center said to me, “Do you really want to eat Miracle-Gro?” I hadn’t thought about it, but when I did, I said, “No” and succumbed to the more expensive bottle of brown goop. Now, whenever I fertilizer the two plants, the dogs go sniffing around the containers like crazy. 

“Could be magnesium deficiency,” said the Internet. The remedy? Go get some Epsom salts and follow the directions on the package. Epsom salts? Well, okay, that’s not too expensive.  I’ll get some tomorrow and try it. Can’t hurt (or can it?). Do you really mean that the Epsom salt package is going to have directions for yellowing plant leaves? Amazing.

“Grind up some cigarette butts and put them in the soil.” “Oh, no, don’t do that,” said another Page, you’ll encourage tobacco mosaic,  a serious tomato disease. That one I remember from my Plant Pathology course at NVCC, taken years ago. Don’t worry, I don’t smoke, and am certainly not going to seek out cigarettes for my cherry tomatoes.

“Get a rusty nail and put it in the soil an inch from the stem, and water as usual,” said the other Gardening Expert. Iron deficiency. I don’t have any rusty nails, and not sure I can get one to rust as fast as I need it to.

“Water more.”  “Water less.”  “Could be due to dramatic changes in temperature.” It was mid-90’s over the weekend after a week of cooler weather. Maybe that’s it. “It’s a natural part of the growth process; just pick them off.” If I picked off all the yellow leaves, the entire plant would be bare. “Fusarium wilt.” Oh, dear. If it’s that, then I’m lost for the season, a fact confirmed by the writer : “Get new plants and be sure to throw out the soil.”

So far, none of this is very helpful. Maybe I do need more micro-nutrients, maybe I should return to my trusty plant fertilizer which has a successful history with my flowers, maybe I’m not watering correctly, or maybe I have fusarium wilt, but I don’t think the latter is the real culprit. Like everything else in life when learning to do something new, I guess I need to continue to research, read, and experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.  Which brings me to my students, the learners in the M.Ed. in Adult Learning program at VCU.

Just Add Knowledge (well, not quite).

I’ve been doing a lot of two things lately in addition to a little gardening. One is meeting with new or prospective students for our program. The other is working on a couple of research projects, trying to make this summer a productive one for writing and getting some journal articles out since I am not teaching during the summer months for the first time in five years. 

I had some renewed momentum for the self-directed learning article with my colleages in our Learning Technology Research Group at the CTE at VCU. I re-immersed myself in the literature and I think I have a structure for this article: It only needs a few more serious days. In the meantime, the deadline looms for a promised chapter on blogging for an exciting new book on using digital media; it focuses on best practices in the classroom.  I was honored to be invited to write a chapter on what we are doing with blogging as reflective practice in our program. 

So, SDL article moves to back burner (again) and the blog study has perked to the top.  My week has been spent re-reading the data, putting it into NVivo for coding, and thinking about the differences between our learners when they come in the door and when they leave– that transformation of self that I see time and time again.  New learners to accomplished graduates – the raison d’etre for my work and career.  It’s what happens in between that’s so exciting that brings me back to my “growing” analogy. 

When I talk with prospective students to our program, I’ve come to realize that they come to see me because they want a face-to-face connection with what they are about to commit to in terms of time and energy. They can get the nuts and bolts of the curriculum, the goals of the program, and the mechanics of how to apply from our School website. The adult learner who sits in my office is basically saying to me, without these words, “I am a busy professional;  I teach (train, educate, work with) other adults in (a wide variety) of organizations.  If I commit my time, my money, and most of all, my energy, what will I get in return?” They are weighing the pros and cons.  “How much time will I need to spend each week with my classes and my studying?” [TRANSLATION: "I have two children, a dog, and a spouse; I have a lawn to mow, I have civic and church groups that I am a part of that mean something to me ... will I have to give these up? How will I fit this master's or doctoral degree in to any already busy schedule?"].

I have come to realize that what brings them to me is not the desire to change something by starting a new educational endeavor, but the desire to make meaning of changes already occurring within their lives and their work. Later on, the learning they acquire may lead to even more changes (I hope so), but basically, the changes have already begun.  What we in higher education do is foster what the developmental process has already set in motion through some other series of life events. In this regard, our role becomes one of enabler. We are the fertilizer, if can use that metaphor, to enhance the internal growth process that has already begun.

So, how to foster and best support this growth? I’ve gotten some great answers to that in reading the data from eleven of our students who volunteered to be a part of the study my colleague and I conducted this year to understand how blogging can deepen their learning.  Many of them have just recently graduated from our program.  I can see the transformations that have taken place. They have reflected deeply, and sometimes profoundly, on the changes in their lives since beginning the program. They have surprised themselves (and, no doubt, a few others) by new actions, new ways of being, new ways of thinking that their learning has spurred.  This story extends far beyond  “Just add knowledge.”  

What a journey it has been thus far.  I think back to the beginning of this journey, when I first discovered the program and went through all the steps of the application process.  I remember walking into my first class, and the day I finished my first course.  I distinctly remember thinking, “One down, 12 to go!”  In a way, those days seem so long ago, yet here I am in my final semester.  I will save most of my overall reflections of the program for the end of the semester, but needless to say, it has been an amazing learning experience.  I have learned so much about adult learning, organizations, working with other people, and most importantly, myself.  I know that this experience has had a great experience on my personal learning as well as my skills as an adult educator.  I am excited to finally have “M.Ed” after my name …

It took me longer than most, but I can now say that I have a Masters in Education with a concentration in Human Resource Development.  What a journey.  When I started the program in 2004, I merely wanted to take a couple classes to get a better sense of adult learning, because I had just taken on a new role as the head of Talent and Learning.  After the first courses, I was hooked on the topic, hooked on the learning and ready to join the program.  Five years later, I have completed the core courses in Research Methods, Program Planning and Evaluation, Adult Learning and Development.  Those behind me, I began the HRD track which happened to coincide with major challenges at work, and ultimately the rare situation of eliminating my own job and that of my team, as my company fell prey to the economic woes of the real estate, mortgage and credit crises. 

As difficult as this was, there is no better teacher than crisis.  The difficulties that we experienced trying to downsize, deliver more with less, restructure our own area while helping the business leaders deal with the same situation in their areas was an experience that provided tremendous practical insight into the theories we were learning in the HRD program.  My classmates became my friends, my therapy group and helped me to work through the challenges we were experiencing.  Ultimately, my job loss gave me the opportunity to complete the program a year ahead of schedule.  For me, I am ready to take what I have learned and continue to grow professionally and personally.  I don’t know exactly what that means, but I am confident that the next step is right around the corner.

So here is the place where I have arrived in my thinking: we learn to make sense of developmental changes that are spurred by many other life circumstances: the birth of a child, the death of a spouse; a change in job role or entry into a new field of employment.  Sometimes, these developmental changes are so subtle that we scarcely recognize them as such, and we simply feel a desire to extend ourselves in a new or renewed direction.  At other times, our desire to learn is spurred by problems we encounter, tomatoes that are turning yellow (!), or grass that could be greener.   When we arrive at this place, we are fortunate to find so many opportunites to direct our own learning, and helpers along the way to assist us.  The adult learners who graduate from this program will be among the special few privileged to accompany other adults along that same journey. It’s part of the joy of of teaching, and, for sure, it is the joy of learning –continuous, lifelong, and ever-demanding in it challenges and rewards.  My tomatoes have turned out to be a success, and I harvest their delicious red fruit each day now.

Harvesting the adult educators in our Adult Learning program is even more fun.

When you are on a sailing trip, as I have been for the past week or so, you learn to do things differently out of necessity … space onboard a 33-foot sailboat simply doesn’t permit the usual manner for doing simple everyday things.  

For example, how I go about cooking (if you can call it that) is very different. I do not prepare food in the same way. Fresh water is in limited supply so I use bottled water to wash fruits and vegetables when I’m making something as basic as a salad for our dinner. Instead of washing the lettuce or tomatoes under a streaming facet like I do at home, I’ll place a portion of a bag of precut lettuce pieces in a small Tupperware container, add a few cherry tomatoes, pour a little bottled water over it all, seal the container and shake. Then I carefully drain the wash water from my nice clean veggies, pat it all with a paper towel, add a little dressing, replace the plastic lid and shake again … and viola! Salad, ready to eat.

Salad in my home kitchen is a much more elaborate production of cutting, chopping, seasoning, and tossing.  In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, my simple salad tastes just as good as the fancier variety at home, maybe better. The same simplified existence can be applied to taking a bath on board (what my mother used to call a “sponge bath” instead of a relaxing tub soak) and myriad other everyday acts of living that are stripped to their essentials (no pun intended), and made do-able in the most frugal of living spaces – probably less than 200 square feet, including sleeping quarters, the galley (kitchen), head (bathroom) and salon (living and dining area).  

Doing Things Differently with Web 2.0

If anything, this past year’s experience in using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom has taught me anew that a similar heuristic applies to teaching with technology: the technology  cannot be grafted onto whatever practices are already in place – it simply doesn’t work that way!  It requires a new mindset, a different way of approaching the teaching and learning interaction.  I found that I had to re-think my syllabus, my activities, and my assignments when I began to teach with wikis and blogs and other tools.  They didn’t work as “add-ons” because they weren’t substitutes for what I was already doing. These tools represented a whole new way of thinking: for me, for the learners, and for the learning we sought to happen in our time together.

This “different” way involves much more than learning to set up a Wetpaint wiki or adopt a blog format for reflective practice.  It is as much of a perspective shift as I’ve had in learning in how to get back to the basics in living aboard a sailboat.  This new mindset  strips the teaching interaction to its essentials which, for me, involves a philosophy of how adults learn so that the learning is meaningful, deep, and lasting.  What teacher doesn’t want this?  It’s doing it that seems to be so hard, because it requires giving up control. Marvin Weisbord expresses this idea perfectly in his new book, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! I’ve discovered that less intervention from me really can mean more learning for them, but it’s a struggle each and every time I enter the classroom. Chris Argyris called this the difference between espoused values and beliefs and theories-in-use.  Doing what we espouse seems ever so much more challenging!

This evolving philosophy about teaching, learning, collaborating, and my role as a facilitator has emerged over time through more than 20 years of working with adult learners, and more than 5 years of teaching in higher education.  I won’t go so far as to say that I am “there” yet, wherever “there” is,  but I can see the road my thinking has traveled through the years. I am also convinced that no one can travel this road for another… we must each explore its terrain for ourselves if we are to experience this shift in thinking. 

I was startled into this realization a couple of weeks ago when I was working with a new adjunct who will be teaching for us this summer at VCU. He is very enthusiastic but his graduate teaching experience is just beginning. I had shared my syllabus with him and the Blackboard site I developed last year when I taught the same class. He admitted that he had never really used Blackboard before, but he was intrigued, and when we met he said, “I want to do this class exactly as you did it last year … with the wikis and blogs and concept maps.”  

Suddenly, this seemed  overwhelming. We’re talking about a five-week summer course, and it begins in less than three weeks.  Very quickly, I saw the difference between learning to use the tools (a matter of showing him how to set up a wiki, establish a blog, or create a concept map) and sharing a philosophy of practice so that he could do it “exactly” as I did last year. 

With time, energy, and interest invested on his part, the first task can be accomplished readily (although it would probably take more than three weeks to become adept in the use of any of these Web 2.0 tools), but I was at a loss how to convey the second, which is a deeply engrained attitude that says when I exercise less (expertise/authority/ control/ guidance), the learners have the opportunity to create more (innovation/ motivation,/ownership/accomplishment).  This is anarchy to some, a relinquishing of the role of sharing what you know.  I do believe that there is a time to share what you know so that my learners may learn from whatever knowledge and experience I’ve acquired,  but I’ve discovered this works best when it comes after they have created their own learning experiences so that we have something to share with each other as we make meaning of the learning that has occurred.

It seems to me that the use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom will always reflect the underlying philosophy of the teacher-as-user, but their power lies in their ability to also shape and modify that philosophy as well.  My evidence of this is my participation in what our Center for Teaching Excellence has offered in the way of institutes, workshops, faculty learning communities, and more when it comes to learning how to use technology in teaching.  I’ve seen my own appetite grow with learning how, which is where we all have to start, but it really began to flourish when grappling with the what and why. Processing this deeply takes time, experimentation, and reflection, something our adjunct will need to do for himself.  In the end, it’s a simple salad, one that is back to the basics of why we teach and what we hope our learners learn. 

Bon appétit!


 

For those of you in the Adult Learning program who were not able to join us on February 18, you missed a  great learning day — a fun travel adventure on Amtrak from Richmond to Crystal City, VA for the Academy of HRD pre-conference workshop on action learning with Dr. Michael Marquardt.  My guess is that each of the seven of us who were a part of the adventure will be blogging about it, so you should have a pretty complete picture of what went on before long. 

For me, it was a treat to bring a group of our students to meet with one of my former professors from George Washington University, and an eye-opener to see just how much Mike Marquardt has done in recent years to expand the concept of action learning in the U.S. and around the world. More than anyone since Reg Revans first introduced the action learning concept almost 60 years ago, Dr. Marquardt has spread the theory and practice of action learning to organizations and scholars far and wide so that it is now considered one of the primary methods for leadership development in organizations. Companies such as Novartis, Siemens, Boeing, Caterpillar, IBN, Nokia, Hong Kong Transit, General Electric, DuPont, Samsung, and many universities like ours, including American University and George Washington University, are using action learning to develop critical thinking, solve complex organizational problems, build powerful teams, and develop leadership competencies among learners.

Our capstone action learning course has been in place since Dr. Lex Dilworth created it in 1995 as an in-depth synthesis learning experience for our master’s degree students in lieu of a thesis requirement.  We have continued to evolve our course, and will be doing so even moreso now that I have had a chance to see how the emphasis on reflection has continued to grow and evolve, along with enchanced strategies for the role of the action learning coach.  We’ll be incorporating practice in the role of the coach in our classes this semester so that each of you in ADLT 636 has a better understanding of how to function in the role of the coach.

Dr. Marquardt delivered a powerful message in a well-designed, tightly packed four-hour learning experience.  We began with an overview of action learning, followed by a half-hour demonstration of the set experience in working with questions to explore the problem issues of a volunteer participant. Four more session volunteers joined the problem-owner and sat in a circle in the middle of the room (a fishbowl experience for the rest of us) as we observed action learning in action.  With Dr. Marquardt serving as the coach, we learned through his role modeling about the power of questions as the group engaged in action learning based on a real organizational problem.  Prior to beginning the questioning process, set members determined the leadership issues that each wanted to develop personally.  We listened and observed the process as a forceful coach required each participant to think deeply about what the group was accomplishing and the implications for each participant in the group demonstration.

After a break and a deep but quick dive into the theoretical heritage of action learning, all forty participants divided into groups of six to seven.  When we had organized ourselves in circles of chairs in different parts of the spacious room, we followed a structured script to guide us in questioning one of our members who shared a real organizational problem personal to the individual, one that he or she had not been able to solve.  Each circle of partipants then outlined our leadership goals and began the questioning process; after few minutes, the group’s coach purposefully stopped the questioning process so we could reflect on what we were doing and how it was going. 

How are we doing as a group thus far?  Give us one word to describe how you are feeling about the process? (okay, not okay, great?)

What are we (as a group) doing well?

What could we do better?

Do we have agreement on the problem — yes or no?  (To check this, each person in the set wrote down a description of the problem and shared them with the group.) Is there agreement?

Once we had agreement, we continued our questionning of the problem owner for another 20 to 25 minutes in our trial action learning experience. In my group, the problem was further clarified and refined at this point in time.  At the conclusion of our session,  our coach asked the problem owner,

What action are you going to take as a result of this session?

Were you helped by the group?  How?

Then, to the group as whole,

What did we do best as a group? 

How have you developed the leadership skill that you specifically set out to work on in the beginning of our session?

What have we learned that each of us can apply to our own organizations?

The experience was well crafted for individual as well as group learning, and I could easily see that we had been missing an emphasis on the strong coach as a leader of our action learning sets in our class experience so far this semester.  However, we can remedy right away! 

As those of us who participated in this experience continue to reflect on what we learned, there are several insights that I gained for making our class action learning experiences more in tune with the true power of this methodology to enhance individual as well as collective learning.  What changed for me in how I view action learning is the emphasis that Dr. Marquardt now places on developing each  member of the set as a leader: the focus on declaring our leadership development intentions, and the practice of carrying them out through questioning.

In our action learning capstone course, our client organizations are the true “owners” of our problems, and they are not members of our set or part of our reflections. They do not have to be for us to embrace the concepts of a strong coach with a determined agenda of keeping the group focused on what it is learning. The power of questions has newly revised meaning for me, as does the role of the coach. We will be building both of these ideas into our practice as we develop the leadership skills of Adult Learning students for solving complex organizational problems that have no one right answer.