Brain Power / Consulting

Lately most of my brain energy has been focused on developing in the new job, not to mention the physical energy I continue to expend duirng the last phase of marathon training.

As a result, I've been lax on adding to the blog. Below are recent observations following a class I co-facilitated yesterday:

11/21/08 – CPI Fundamentals

This group had many social workers and others for whom the class was mandatory.

I was struck again how there is often one or two questions written in the evals that could have easily been answered, had the student asked during the class. At some point, they need to meet us half-way. Students need to take responsibility for their own educations.

Having said that, I have an idea to improve based on the feedback that we got afterwards: it sounds like at least one person would have liked to hear ‘how a RPIW is born / comes into being’ story, not unlike the ‘how a bill becomes a law’ story from those old Schoolhouse Rock episodes in the ‘80s.

I always build in time for questions, and I frequently ask if they have any. This emphasizes that I certainly don’t do it too much, and could still benefit from building in more ways to pull out the class members.

There were several comments about the dryness of the content. Part of this probably ties back, again, to the fact that the members didn’t particularly want to be there. On the other hand, there’s always room to make the content more dynamic and interesting. This exists both for the presenter and for us as a group, as we continue to polish the material.

Another feedback disconnect occurred between the perception that the class was too long, and the sufficiency with which the content was covered. For example, I felt like the Quality module went really well. Discussion went well, folks were engaged, I trust in my own understanding of the content... yet I got many ‘4’ out of ‘5’s, along with feedback that the class was too long.

I wonder if there’s room to split the groups into 2’s and 3’s for the more pivotal discussions. That way everyone hears and is heard, even if the group gets fragmented.

The Airplane Simulation was the funnest part of the day. For one thing, it strongly resembled teaching folks to play a new game – more than resembled – in many ways, that’s what it is.

I’ve had some practice with this lately, so getting everyone to understand what they were to do went smoothly. Everything else just kinda worked. The total run time didn’t get out of hand, the lead time was reasonable, and shrank appropriately with the second run. Productivity worked, and tripled between runs (from .06 to .2). As always, it’s important to keep the units: the number represents percent of a plane built per person per minute.