Category Archives: Social and emotional learning

The 3 Keys to Powerful Workshops

  By laurelfelt | November 6, 2016 - 11:43 am | , ,
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What keeps an organization afloat? From my experiences directing a non-profit and running a small business, I’ve discovered that I depend on budget and buy-in — in other words, I need cash and people who care. Effective training for staff and supporters can positively impact both budget and buy-in. First, it can increase administrative efficiency, which saves time (and time is money!); second, it can fire up supporters’ passion, which boosts their commitment (and commitment can deliver both time and money!).   

Training usually occurs within the context of a workshop. But despite the importance of effective training, I’ve found that most workshops are bad. Has that been your experience too? You know a bad workshop when you’re stuck in it. You may feel it bone-deep, coming up as sensations of intense boredom or profound frustration. Or you may observe it intellectually, noting such classic “bad workshop” indicators as:

  • You haven’t moved or said a word for an extended period of time;
  • The facilitator is spewing information that you could have just as easily read or watched on YouTube;
  • You catch yourself thinking, “I’m losing hours of my life that I’ll never get back…”

I am declaring an end to bad workshops! From my studies and applied work, which include a doctoral dissertation in 21st century learning and over 15 years of teaching experience, I’ve identified 3 keys to powerful workshops that change people’s lives. Powerful workshops are NOT lectures — they’re playful, participatory, and practical experiences.

JUMP ON THE PHONE WITH ME NOW and let’s strategize how to enhance your upcoming workshop!

Here’s how I understand the 3 keys to powerful workshops:

  • Playful

Good workshops are FUN.

A warm, upbeat atmosphere is a must. Research has found that this sort of context fuels creativity, boosts engagement, and facilitates relationship-building, all of which supports learning. To drive the fun factor, I suggest playing games and/or learning through play. Games and play lower the stakes around “failure,” allowing people to take risks without fear of losing face. In my dissertation, I describe playfulness as “where joy meets iteration.”

Good workshops are people-centered, celebrating the individuals in the room and honoring their human needs. What does this look like? Participants learn each other’s names and have the freedom to move their bodies, ask questions, make comments, crack jokes, and find comfortable spaces to work. Everyone’s experience is enriched by the presence of their peers.

  • Participatory

Good workshops are HANDS-ON.

Now, we all have our preferred learning style. Some people excel when information is shared visually — they like to read text or scrutinize images that communicate big ideas. Others appreciate auditory information — they like to listen to explanations of how things work. Still others embrace kinesthetic information — they like to learn through doing. Sensitive instructors share information in all three of these ways, setting up every type of learner for success. But here’s a secret: A well-designed hands-on experience delivers a three-in-one.

When we engage in a well-designed hands-on experience, we learn through seeing, hearing, and doing. Additionally, we’re developing muscle memory and likely problem-solving, both of which helps us to better recall what to do and why. And isn’t that the point of a workshop — to teach us something we can use later?  

  • Practical

Good workshops are USEFUL.

While it can be fun to learn for learning’s sake, to immerse in a theoretical puzzle or toy with an abstract idea, that is not the stuff of workshops. Workshops should be goal-oriented, offering strategies that address real world challenges. For example, a staff workshop may focus on how to use office software. A supporter workshop may teach how to engage with your product in secret or sophisticated ways.

Good workshops meet participants where they’re at in terms of background knowledge and skill level, and provide participants with tangible products that further their objectives. Let’s say you want to teach staff how to use office software. If you put on a good workshop, then participants might walk away with: a printed packet with step-by-step directions and illustrative screenshots; a desktop shortcut to the application; a username and login; contact info for IT/support. Thanks to that good workshop, participants are equipped to hit the ground running.

Applying the 3 keys to your upcoming workshop can enrich your business or non-profit by positively impacting budgets and buy-in.

I wish you all the best with your upcoming workshop and invite you to CONTACT ME to discuss strategies for bringing your public speaking and/or facilitation to the next level!


Circles: Healing Through Restorative Justice

  By laurelfelt | April 16, 2014 - 12:48 pm | , , , , ,
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re-posted from http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/restorative-justice/restorative-justice-circles.html

By  | March 5, 2014

This is part of a series examining Restorative Justice in schools and communities, produced in partnership with the California Endowment.

 
 
circles02
“Who or what inspires you to be your best self?”

This is hardly the question that most Angelenos would ask at 9:30 in the morning on a gray, rainy Saturday. But for the 80+ adults and youth who gathered on March 2 at Mendez Learning Center in Boyle Heights, this introspective query kicked off “Circles,” a rich, daylong exploration of Restorative Justice.

Restorative Justice (RJ) seeks to cultivate both peacemaking and healing by facilitating meaningful dialogue. Practiced through conversation circles, whose norms include “listen with respect” and “speak from the heart,” RJ provides contexts for sharing feelings and perspectives related to community issues and conflicts. Individuals directly engaged in altercations, as well as bystanders and other community members, gather to discuss inciting incidents, understandings, preferences, past experiences, ideas, and advice.

According to one Circles participant, a senior at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, RJ works. He and a peer had a falling out this past fall — he had criticized the peer and then they began fighting. Both were invited to a RJ circle to work it out. The circle, populated by fellow students and facilitated by a trained RJ counselor, gave the two young men a space to air their grievances and, importantly, get to know each other. In Aceves’s opinion, this was critical. Now the former combatants are good friends, hanging out together practically every weekend.

While this rosy outcome isn’t typical, RJ increases the likelihood of such a relational development. Compared to traditional responses, like turning a blind eye, assigning short-term mediation, or sentencing wrong-doers with detention, suspension, or expulsion, RJ’s odds of building interpersonal bridges is infinitely superior.

Traditional justice systems use punishment, such as zero-tolerance, to deter students from breaking rules, whereas RJ assumes that strong relationships and community investment function as deterrence. Traditional justice systems are reactive and atomistic, meting out consequences to perpetrators of discrete, forbidden acts — for instance, suspending the student who threw the first punch. But RJ is proactive and collectivistic, engaging a network of students before and during negotiations of conflict. RJ is also restorative, aiming to support participants in healing, problem-solving, and making amends.

 

 

Omar Ramirez, a visual artist with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and who served as a Circles small group leader, frames RJ as a means to shut down the “school to prison pipeline.” RJ might help to do this in several ways.

Because RJ is a dialogic alternative to suspension and expulsion, it breaks the cycle of disproportionately meting out punitive disciplinary consequences to students with disabilities and students of color. This stops the implicit messaging that these students are unwelcome in school, and helps to keep them off the streets. According to The California Conference for Equality and Justice, a suspension at any point during high school makes a student three times more likely to drop out than a peer who has never been suspended.

Additionally, it’s possible that RJ participants who acquire tools for communicating and managing emotions will find it easier to resist criminal activity. Participating in RJ also might help youths to engage in perspective-taking and practice empathy, both of which boost negatively predict bullying and boost students’ social and emotional competence. This is critical, since researchers from Sonoma State University have contended that “deficits in emotional competence skills appear to leave young people ill-equipped to cope effectively with interpersonal challenges.” 1

Due to RJ’s capacity to both support students’ social-emotional health and contribute to school climate change, members of the Building Healthy Communities – Boyle Heights (BHC-BH) collaborative have championed its practice. Building Healthy Communities is an effort of The California Endowment to support 14 communities’ holistic health; Boyle Heights, as well as Long Beach and South Los Angeles, are among these communities. Forty non-profits and community-based organizations comprise the BHC-BH collaborative. Its mission, according to BHC-BH’s campaign literature, is to “meet with resident and youth leaders to establish efforts that will improve the health narrative of Boyle Heights.”

Pilot RJ programs launched in Long Beach and at Boyle Heights’s Roosevelt High School this 2013-2014 academic year. But to scale up RJ and implement it in every school in Boyle Heights (not to mention every Los Angeles Unified School District institution), funding is necessary — specifically, funding to support the salary of each school’s full-time RJ counselor.

In this context of state-wide budget deficits, locating any money at all requires creative activism. BHC-BH has identified as its RJ funding solution the Local Control Funding Formula(LCFF). Introduced in California’s 2013-2014 budget, the LCFF provides grants for schools that serve foster youth, English Language Learners, and/or youths eligible to receive a free or reduced-price meal. This describes many of Boyle Heights’ students.

 

 

Las Fotos Project presented the Circles workshop, in partnership with several community-based organizations: The Greenlining Institute, the California Conference for Equality and Justice, InnerCity Struggle, Khmer Girls in Action, Violence Prevention Coalition, and Alliance for California Traditional Arts. 2 Together, they defined the workshop’s objectives, which included raising attendees’ awareness of the BCH-BH, educating them about LCFF, and inviting them to urge officials to direct local LCFF funds towards RJ. According to Eric Ibarra, founder of Las Fotos Project, the March 2 workshop also was inspired by his pride in his students’ photo essays.

Ibarra’s Las Fotos Project seeks to empower Latina youth through photography, mentorship, and self-expression. Whereas five of Ibarra’s students last year premiered their photo essays online, this year Ibarra yearned to share his students’ projects with live audiences as well. Moreover, since this year’s photo essays examined RJ, Ibarra wanted audiences to explore RJ hands-on, learn about how RJ can be funded locally, and access pathways to activism.

That’s precisely what the Circles workshop offered. After attendees shared who or what inspired them to be their best selves, they watched a photo essay created by Las Fotos Project participant Lorena Arroyo. A 17-year-old Roosevelt High School student, Arroyo documented cheerleader Gaby’s explorations of RJ within her squad. Following the photo essay presentation, Arroyo proudly bowed to Circles attendees’ thunderous applause. Four more of these media projects, highlighting the respective RJ journeys of two students, a parent, and a school staff member, will be forthcoming from Las Fotos Project participants.

Explained Ibarra, Circles represents “the efforts of a lot of really passionate people … We believe in the importance of collaboration and sharing resources to work together for a common cause.”

Rich in geographic, ethnic, and occupational diversity, Circles attendees seemed to share that collaborative ethos. For example, Circle #3, facilitated by Ramirez, included three high school students, a community organizer, a nun, a PhD candidate [myself], a high school teacher, and an editor [of KCET Departures], all of whom eagerly embraced RJ’s community spirit. Establishing our own dialogic circle gave us a space to learn about RJ and each other. We shared and, more importantly, deeply listened to personal stories about a Native American grandmother, a growing daughter, an insensitive coworker, a resilient student, and a passion for ’80s fashion. We also discussed RJ definitions and how to conduct circles for addressing teacher-student conflicts.

To close the workshop, each Circle group practiced and promoted RJ through the use of a different art form, e.g., collage, journaling, breakdancing. Articulated members of the spoken word circle, “I am a beautiful dreamer, I am a strong fighter.” Members of the songwriting circle entitled their tune, “We Want to Restore Justice.” Together they sang the refrain, “This is ours/People power.”

In the view of 20-year-old Anaheim community organizer Carlos Becerra, the implications of this people power can be revolutionary. Stated Becerra, “Restorative Justice, when implemented in our global community, has the potential to create world wide peace and prosperity.”

 

21st Century Teaching Practices

  By laurelfelt | April 1, 2014 - 2:36 pm | , ,
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Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012

Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012

Pellegrino, J.W. & Hilton, M.L. (Eds.). (2012). Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

After conducting extensive interdisciplinary research on behalf of The National Research Council, several committees of experts in education, psychology, evaluation, sociology, physics, astronomy, geology, learning sciences, and cognitive science recommended the following 21st century teaching practices:

o Using multiple and varied representations of concepts and tasks, such as diagrams, numerical and mathematical representations, and simulations, combined with activities and guidance that support mapping across the varied representations.

o Encouraging elaboration, questioning, and explanation—for example, prompting students who are reading a history text to think about the author’s intent and/or to explain specific information and arguments as they read—either silently to themselves or to others.

o Engaging learners in challenging tasks, while also support- ing them with guidance, feedback, and encouragement to reflect on their own learning processes and the status of their understanding.

o Teaching with examples and cases, such as modeling step-by- step how students can carry out a procedure to solve a problem and using sets of worked examples.

o Priming student motivation by connecting topics to students’ personal lives and interests, engaging students in collaborative problem solving, and drawing attention to the knowledge and skills students are developing, rather than grades or scores.

o Using formative assessment to: (a) make learning goals clear to students; (b) continuously monitor, provide feedback, and respond to students’ learning progress; and (c) involve students in self- and peer assessment.

SOURCE: Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012, pp. 9-10.

Reporting on Impacts of Youth Media Literacy

  By laurelfelt | March 28, 2014 - 12:46 pm | , , , ,
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"Home Is Where the Heart Is," a silkscreen piece created by participants of Circles Restorative Justice workshop, March 1, 2014

“Home Is Where the Heart Is,” silkscreen piece created by participants of Circles Restorative Justice workshop, March 1, 2014

I’ve recently come full circle in more ways than one.

During high school and college, I had the privilege of reporting features stories for such publications as Glenbrook South High School’s The Oracle and Northwestern University’s The Daily Northwestern, The Summer Northwestern, and arts + performance magazine. 

A dozen-plus years later, I’m reporting features stories once again; appropriately, my first subject was a workshop entitled “Circles.” On Saturday, March 1, 2014, I engaged in participant-observation by joining fabulously motivated peers, jotting notes, and conducting informal interviews at this day-long exploration of Restorative Justice.

Restorative Justice (RJ) seeks to cultivate both peacemaking and healing by facilitating meaningful dialogue. Practiced through conversation circles, whose norms include “listen with respect” and “speak from the heart,” RJ provides contexts for sharing feelings and perspectives related to community issues and conflicts. Individuals directly engaged in altercations, as well as bystanders and other community members, gather to discuss inciting incidents, understandings, preferences, past experiences, ideas, and advice (Felt, 2014, para. 3).

This workshop also was irresistible from a scholarly standpoint as it situated itself squarely within my research interests: youths, social and emotional competence, communication proficiency, arts and media, and community-building. I became acquainted with the phenomenal work of partner organizations, including Las Fotos Project, and am eager to cultivate professional relationships in this space.

My publisher is Departures, a transmedia resource hosted by the largest independent public television station in the United States, KCET. Departures uniquely cultivates southern Californians’ civic pride and sociological imaginations through reporting on community-level stories in such areas as activism, immigration, art, gentrification, food, city planning, small businesses, murals, history, and politics. The Departures site also offers multiple participation points, from opportunities to engage with interactive maps and multimedia installations to invitations to help solve civic challenges (e.g., How would you improve the 710 corridor? How can an empty lot in Cypress Park become a community asset?).

This wasn’t my first brush with Departures. Back in 2011, Rubi Fregoso of Departures Youth Voices facilitated a workshop for graduates of the PLAY! program, a multi-part professional development + research project designed and evaluated by USC Annenberg Innovation Lab colleagues and myself. On January 22, 2014, Rubi again lent her expertise to a USC Annenberg endeavor by participating in a webinar entitled “Spreading Your Story.”  This webinar was sponsored by my friends/associates in the Media, Activism and Participatory Politics project, an entity that bridges the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the USC School of Cinematic Arts Media + Practice Division, and the Connected Learning Research Network. Kat Primeau, one of my co-conspirators at non-profit Laughter for a Change, also participated in the webinar. With so many friends gathered simultaneously at the same online spot, discussing one of my favorite subjects — how to spread youth civic engagement stories — I couldn’t stop myself from posting to the webinar’s real-time backchannel chat.

Here’s the webinar:

Watch live streaming video from connectedlearningtv at livestream.com

 

In light of all of this journalistic activity and online communication, I have applied to the UCD Clinton Institute’s 2014 Summer Seminar, a week-long deep-dive into how to be an academic AND a journalist. Should I be accepted, I hope to expand on my recent article on Restorative Justice (RJ). I wonder how, if at all, international youth-produced media has supported RJ movements and/or exemplified RJ processes? Which effects, if any, have these youth productions had on knowledge, attitudes, practices, or policies?

Meanwhile, I’m loving the opportunity to interview trailblazing media literacy organizations and share their important work with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)’s 2000+ recipients of its online newsletter. My first piece featured the Center for Media Literacy (CML), an assignment for which I interviewed CML’s accomplished President and CEO Tessa Jolls.

Since 1989, when media literacy pioneer Elizabeth Thoman established CML, this organization has served as a global resource for media literacy education. CML has worked with overseas partners in such far-flung nations as Peru, South Korea, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while simultaneously continuing to produce original curricula that meet the United States’s diverse education standards (Felt, 2014, para. 2).

…

Reflected Jolls, “It’s not so much about the technology, it’s about critical thinking, and having the process skills, whether you’re producing or consuming. So that’s what we’ve been trying to focus on — what’s timeless, what’s a systematic way of looking at media, and how media operate as a system” (Felt, 2014, para. 12).

Reconnecting with my journalism roots and networking with people/organizations whose work supports youths’ cultivation of vital 21st century skills is deeply rewarding both personally and professionally. I look forward to continuing to enjoy this synergy as the District 4 delegate to City Councilmember Tom La Bonge for Los Angeles ArtsDay 2014.

Thanks to everyone who helped to make these developments possible!