I believe that a healthy organization is a learning organization. What does that mean? Here are a few characteristics:

* People feel they are doing something that matters.
* Every person in the organization is growing, learning–and unlearning as conditions change.
* There are few (if any) sacred cows, and people feel free to challenge them.
* Employees are encouraged to take risks, and mistakes are just learning opportunities.
* Attention is on problem-solving and progress rather than positioning and politicking.
* Staff members know that their primary focus should not be on pleasing management, but on working together to please the customer.

These ideas come from Peter Senge (author of The Fifth Discipline) and others who have described the learning organization. How does your organization stack up?

As the end of the year approaches it’s a good time to take stock of how committed your team members are feeling about their jobs before they make New Year’s resolutions to find new ones.  In today’s working environment, employees tend to take a mercenary approach to their employment.  Most people approach their jobs with a “what’s in it for me” attitude.  While you might wish it were not so, your best bet for minimizing turnover is to view each individual’s job experience as they see it themselves.  To facilitate this process I developed the Employee Motivation Analysis (click on the picture to see a larger image so you can actually read the questions).  I first used this chart when I was job hunting to compare opportunities, but now I use it far more often to understand whether my employees are flight risks.

You can take a crack at filling this out on your own for each of team member (I have included questions to help you evaluate where people stand on the various aspects of job satisfaction) but I have found that this is a great tool to use in goals meetings with individual employees.  Go through the sheet together and ask how your folks would rate their jobs in these areas.  This is a great way to be proactive about motivating your staff, and hopefully will keep your from being blindsided by unexpected turnover.

FTG is a consulting company that specializes in convergent technologies in engineering design organizations. We conduct research in the areas of CAD, CAE, PDM, Knowledge Management, and professional staff development issues.

Steven R. Foster is our chief consultant and technology visionary. He is an author, researcher, technologist and educator with over 35 years experience in industry, government and academia. His specialty is in the areas of 3-Dimensional Modeling, Computer Aided Design and Engineering, Product Data Management (PDM), and Information Systems Management. He has worked as CAD Drafter, Product Designer; Educator in secondary and post-secondary levels; taught CAD and engineering graphics; assisted in implementing an offshore engineering /design center in Bangalore, India; managed a CADD training center; and was involved in overseeing Engineering/IT in a major corporation.

Mr. Foster has worked in the fields of nuclear power plant design and construction, manufacturing, architectural and aerospace CAD/PDM management and consulting. Mr. Foster has specialized in professional CAD/CAE/PDM staff development; developed curriculum and training programs in business and industry; presented at a variety of national conferences and is the author of three books on CAD applications packages. He holds a BS and a MS degree from the University of Tennessee where he majored in Industrial Education, minored in Adult Education, and even found time for an un-declared graduate major in Computer Science specializing in Computer Graphics.

To be effective as a manager it’s helpful if you understand and adapt your own communication style when you are interacting with other members of your team.  As with time management there are many tools and instruments to assess communication style and personality type.  Each of the sites listed below describes a tool or assessment process, and will allow you to find practitioners who can deliver it to your staff and help you interpret the results.  In most cases you can take a sample assessment online and see a summary of the results.  I recommend that you try each one and see what fits the needs of your team and your organization.

Most HR managers are familiar with these tools, and may be able to tell you which ones have been used in the organization in the past.  They may even be certified in the use of a specific assessment, so start with an email or conversation with your HR department for guidance on this process.

 Myers Briggs – www.myersbriggs.org

 Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile – www.tmsdi.com

 Kiersey Temperment Scale – www.kiersey.com

 The Forté Institute – www.theforteinstitute.com

My personal preference is the Forté survey because it uses terminology that’s more familiar to people (introvert/extrovert, patient/impatient) which can be helpful for those of you who are not trained in psychology.

I love when stuff is in-my-face karma! This has happened very recently and beyond, and is still manifesting after an introduction last year. Both of these are biz related and about being totally letting go of competitiveness, that is, going with the philosophy that “there’s enough to go around”- which is in total harmony with “abundance” theories.
So here is the telling:)
Tonight I gave a talk in a local bookshop in Long Island (that is now carrying my newly published book, SOAR! with Resilience: www.balanceandpower.com/soarwithresilience.php) to a well attended group of   singles- organized by a singles event planner  who won my raffle for a complimentary coaching session at a well attended networking venue…
2) at the beginning of the year, a colleague, who I invited to collaborate with me in LI Head Start trainings at a Staff Development-Conference venue “passed” me on to a CUNY(City University of NY) rep. I am currently doing trainings and have had advance group sales of my book for courses.

All good! What goes around comes around:)

excerpts from  Learning From Online (Inside Higher Ed News) – December 7, 2009 

Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course, Buckenmeyer says.

When teaching online, she says, “You have to pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you’re assigning activities and assessments, [and make] certain everything is perfectly clear to the students. In a face-to-face situation, you can get by with just coming in and not having prepared and winging a class session. You can’t do that online.”

Or rather, you can’t do that online if you expect students to learn well. “You can develop a really bad online course,” says Buckenmeyer, without necessarily knowing it. In order to teach well online, she says, professors need guidance.

That was the thesis behind the creation of Calumet’s Distance Education Mentoring Project. The project takes faculty who are looking to adapt their classroom courses to the online environment and teams them up with Web-savvy colleagues. Those mentors advise the novices on best practices for online course design and oversee them through the first semester of the online version of the course.

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Sounds like a good idea.  To take it further, those faculty members who use technology well can be used as mentors to those who are not as tech savvy.

A great exercise for any new manager is to do a personal SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis.  This framework is useful for analyzing many different types of scenarios including new product proposals, individual contributors and vendors, but in this case we will use is as a self evaluation tool.  You can use it to takes an inventory of what you bring to your new job, and where you need to focus your personal development time and efforts to ensure your success.

Here is the SWOT framework with questions for each section.  Take a blank sheet of paper and brainstorm as many answers for each section as you can.  Feel free to contact your friends, co-workers and mentors and ask them what items they might add.

Completing this analysis can help you get a more complete picture of what you bring to the table as an employee and a manager.  Consider developing a plan for each weakness/threat, and use this analysis as a jumping off point for conversations with your manager about training and personal development. 

It is recommended that no less than 2% of your personnel budget be devoted each year to continuing education for your staff. In the best of times, I’m sure many organizations abide by this rule of thumb. But what about during the lean years? How can you keep staff skills sharp when there is little time or money to spend?

1. One a week. Encourage your staff to learn and share one new thing each week. Chances are, they are learning already, but may not be reflecting on what they have learned. Share at a weekly staff meeting, or make everyone responsible for asking as many of their coworkers as possible, “What one new thing did you learn this week?”

2. Cross-train. In any organization with more than one or two employees, there is a tendency for people to operate in silos. Cross-training not only facilitates skill development, it helps staff better understand their own roles in fulfilling the mission of the organization.

3. Go for freebies! Watch for free webinars and podcasts. There are a lot of electronic offerings nowadays, and they generally take very little time and no travel funds. Sources can include vendors, other libraries or nonprofits, professional associations, and other groups. Try a web search on the topic of interest or set up a Google Alert for “free webinar.”

4. Share the cost. Consider partnering with neighbors for continuing education events. If you are only responsible for half or a third of a speaker’s fee, it might make a special CE event possible. Who might you invite to join your group and share in the cost?

5. Read and talk. Start a staff book discussion group. Read titles that will enhance staff skills, and discuss them in the context of your organization. This is a great learning (and bonding) exercise.

What low- or no-cost resources do you use for staff continuing education?

“As regards Dumfriesshire, whither both fame and notoriety had preceded the newcomer, the figure of a poetical farmer was rather an object of suspicious curiosity than of neighbourliness.”

Thus wrote Catherine Carswell of the poet Robert Burns when he took over the tenancy of Ellisland Farm near Dumfries in 1788. Fortunately, neighbourliness and hospitality were much more in evidence from the good people of Dumfries and Galloway when I went visiting them this week. First stop, on Tuesday, was the very attractive new Castle Douglas Primary School on Tuesday (I’m sure the heating in your lovely games hall will be working again soon!), to work with primary staff from across the region, before moving on the following day to contribute to the staff development day at Lockerbie Academy, where the secondary staff  and their primary colleagues had come together to discuss Literacy Across Learning, and to begin to lay the foundations for a cluster-wide approach to literacy, which will ensure that their pupils are well prepared to deal with the complexities of life in the 21st century. What impressed me most when talking to the cross-curricular literacy group was the willingness of the staff to get to grips with some very challenging issues, for the sake of the common goal of providing the best possible experience for every young person in their care. I thoroughly enjoyed both sessions and appreciated the very positive response to the workshops.

One promise I made - which is a pleasure to keep, as I think it demonstrates the fact that developing common reading strategies which apply to all media is the way forward - is this one. In Tuesday’s session, after some input from me on reading strategies, the staff were issued with a text which is fairly commonly used in upper primary or lower secondary schools – A Case of Murder by Vernon Scannell - and given the following task:

 “Rather than asking pupils to answer a set of questions on the poem, how many alternative lessons could you come up with, using the seven reading strategies, to develop and demonstrate an understanding of the poem and poetry in general?” 

The results, not surprisingly, were highly creative, rich and varied, so I have collated them (all 33 of them) below. Feel free to add more!

Thirty-Three Ways to Promote Close Reading of A Case of Murder by Vernon Scannell

 Predicting

• Provide title and first line. Discuss what might follow.
• Read up to ‘he loathed all that’. Write and/or discuss what might happen.
• Provide title and last line. Predict what happens.
• Read poem up to ‘under the stair’. Write possible ending before reading actual ending.

Asking Questions

• Groups generate own questions which arise from the poem. Groups swap questions for further discussion.
• Ask pupils to discuss what one single question they would ask each of the characters.
• Use ‘surprises’ grid to list all the surprises which occur.

Making Comparisons

• Talk about own ‘guilty secrets’ (could be risky!)
• List the stories/characters in fiction this reminds you of.
• Find other poems/stories with the same theme and compare against agreed criteria.

Looking for Patterns

• List and count the words which are used more than once
• Use Wordle (www.wordle.net) to re-order the poem and pick out most significant words
• Find all the rhyming words.
• Use highlighter pens to highlight adjectives (descriptive words)

Making Pictures

• Draw the cat. Draw the boy.
• Storyboard the poem in 6 pictures.
• Create cartoon version of the poem using online cartoon maker such as Comicbrush.
• Draw character MindMaps for the boy and the cat.
• Draw the murder scene.
• Draw something to represent each of the emotions found in the poem. Discuss most appropriate colour for each.

Summarising

• Write the boy’s diary/blog entry for that day.
• Issue the poem with the title removed. Ask pupils to write the best title. Discuss and compare with original.
• Write the story of the poem in 6 words/50 words/140 characters
• Write the newspaper headline as it might appear in the local paper.
• Write the newspaper story.
• Write the poem as a story in your own words.

Evaluating

• Make a list of the excuses the boy might use for the cat’s disappearance.
• Conduct the mock trial of the boy for his crime.
• Write an alternative ending (in the style of the author?)
• Stage mini-debate on the reasons for writing the poem.
• Write the story from the cat’s point of view.

Finally, make a podcast or videocast of the poem. Rehearse and READ IT ALOUD with as much fluency, understanding and expression as possible!

All managers should have a realistic understanding of the ebb and flow of their team’s lives outside of work. That is not to say that you need to be best friends with your direct reports, or that you need to delve into your team’s personal lives.  It’s more that you should make an effort to understand that an individual’s performance and motivation is not static and varies according to what else is going on in their personal ecosystem. As such an individual might be highly productive and motivated for several months, and then become distracted, burnt out or otherwise unmotivated due to something outside of the office.

It is important that you, as a new manager, make an effort to be attuned to the variations in your team’s motivations.   Rather than punish the person for their drop in productivity, it’s better to try to find out the root cause and offer some flexibility.  If you proactively approach an employee who’s work seems to be dropping in quality or quantity, and offer to adjust their workload accordingly for a few months, you will find that they turn out to be even more motivated and productive in the future. Using a pro-active, flexible approach will build both trust and loyalty with your team, and encourage them to work hard when they need to, but to maintain a healthy balance. This will avoid your being blindsided by an employee suddenly quitting or dropping the ball in a major way.

In the best case scenario, you will build an environment where your team gives you realistic information about their ability to perform at their peak, and when you really need them to come up with a little extra, they will be happy to do so.

Professional learning communities, and working on an action plan or toward a common goal, can be an effective way to increase learning for both staff and students.  Many schools have trouble initially coming to terms with the idea of trading their old traditional practices for the opportunity to try something new in staff development.  Those that do, have to take several steps in order to ensure the success of the project.  Although the process often may be challenging, many teachers that have gone through the process seem to claim it is worthwhile, and that they feel a sense of accomplishment and self-efficacy (DuFour, pg.251).    

I realized after the module, readings, and discussions this week that a successful action plan could have many things holding it back.  Schools may lack the motivation to put theory into practice, and many may continue to hold the attitude that they are not ready to act, amongst other things.  The staff needs to collaborate and work together to overcome these barriers and work toward the common goal.  I really like DuFour’s quote that “the school that actually does the work of a PLC will develop its capacity to help all students learn far more effectively than the school that spends years preparing to be a PLC (pg.250).”

The second mindset adjustment involves being held responsible for more work than you could possibly complete by yourself.  This is corollary to point #1 because when you realize that your subordinates are less efficient and/or less skilled, you will be tempted to try to do the work yourself instead but must realize that this is likely impossible and counter productive to your own success as a manager.  In order to adapt to these adjustments you must learn to motivate your team and apply your skills in a targeted and controlled fashion or you will end up spreading yourself too thin and becoming ineffective.

If you have successfully discovered what your team is working on by reviewing their job descriptions, their current projects, and their stated goals, your next task is to learn to delegate effectively.  Delegation is a delicate art, especially when you are new to a management position.  All new managers tend to vacillate between micro-managing (i.e. breathing down the neck of your reports and poking them every time they do something that you would not have done) and being too far removed from the process (i.e. hiding inyour office wondering what you are supposed to be doing as a “manager”). 

The goal of successful delegation is to isolate a specific task or goal, set a deadline and a definition of success, and then create a reasonable number of checkpoints along the way which will allow the task to be brought back on track if it has gone astray.  Once that framework is in place, a task can be delegated in a sufficiently hands off manner that both you and your team member report can keep track of it without undue stress.  It then becomes the manager’s job to keep track of the deadlines and checkpoints on an ongoing basis, freeing your team member to focus on the completion of the task itself.  The entire key to successful delegation lies in effectively defining the boundaries of the task or goal being delegated as it’s achievement (or lack thereof) must be interpreted identically by both parties.

The first major mindset adjustment in transitioning from a team member to a manager is that you (as manager) are now being held responsible for work that is not your own.  Since most team members who are promoted to management positions are given new responsibilities due to the high quality of their own work, it can be frustrating to be held responsible for the delivery of work that is being done by people less motivated or less skilled than you.  Your new job, however, is to raise the level of your team’s work through developing your staff so the best thing you can do to prime yourself for success as a team manager is to create a development path for each member of your team which will move them towards producing high quality work. 

To deal with this issue, it’s critical to schedule regular goals meetings with your team members.  Start with half an hour with each team member and lay out their current goals (usually long term goals will tie back to their job description, while short term goals will tie back to specific projects they are working on).  This will be a great discovery exercise for you as you may find that people on your team are focusing on things you were not aware of.

Go through everyone’s goals and make sure you understand them, and that they are aligned with and support the objectives of your team.  Then schedule quarterly (or even monthly) meetings with each member of your team to review, prioritize, and get updates on the status of their progress towards these objectives.

Taking the time to set goals and keep your eye on the progress will help you keep on top of what’s going on around you.  Ideally if you do this regularly, you will be familiar with not only your team’s progress, but where they need help from you.  There will be more on this when we talk about time management.

(Thanks to two good friends – David Smith, for once again enriching the Christian education community via his newest book, and to Bruce Hekman, for providing this review of the book!)

In my city of Holland, Michigan, where the annual celebration of Tulip Time celebrates our Dutch beginnings, I was startled to learn recently that fifty-one percent of young people, aged eighteen and under, are Hispanic. What’s happening in Holland is being replicated across North America, in rural areas, cities and towns.

We’re been hearing it and reading about it for years: North America is becoming increasingly multicultural. Some schools, such as those in urban centers and along the coasts, have experienced a steady rise in the number of non-North American students for some time, and have added staff and programs to help them adjust and become full members of the school community (English as a Second Language programs, tutors, new admissions policies for International students, school to school partnerships, immersion language programs.

A number of schools have added out-of-country short-term mission trips to their programs, where students and staff spend a week on projects (often building) through programs such as the Hands program offered and facilitated by World Wide Christian Schools. Other schools, such as Fraser Valley Christian High School and Zeeland Christian School have developed partnerships with schools in other countries.

But many schools have found their attempts to work interculturally to be like building a bridge as they walk on it. They want to find ways to welcome the strangers and to equip their students and faculty to be sensitive to the needs of these new, often non-English speaking members, but it’s often discouraging work and the bridges don’t lead anywhere (as we discovered with the trendy workshops on “diversity training” that proliferated for a decade or more).

Now there’s a wonderful new resource for all schools and churches interested in a deeper, better way to imagine intercultural learning from a biblical, Reformed world view.

In his recent book Learning From the Stranger (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009), David Smith makes a detailed biblical argument that “hospitality, humility, and hearing belong together.” “If they part ways, then the idea of hospitality easily becomes a new form of condescension in which I am always the host and the other is my needy guest.” At its best, intercultural encounters move us from learning about others to learning from them and finally to learning with them.

Smith, from Britain, teaching German at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has thought for a long time about “the need for a framework for thinking in Christian terms about learning other languages and cultures in a way that takes seriously learning from the stranger.” (p. 149) In the seven chapters of the book he lays out such a framework and attempts to ground it theologically in scripture, looking in great detail at the story of the nomad Abraham’s fears and failures, Jesus’ challenges to the teacher of law to learn to obey scripture from an outsider, a Samaritan, and finally at the birth of the early church at Pentecost.

Learning from the Stranger articulates what “culture” is, and discusses the ways in which our cultural differences affect our perceptions and our behavior. His analysis and his stories resonate because virtually none of us interacts exclusively with people who look, talk, behave, and think like we do in our culturally interconnected world.

To be Christian, Smith argues, means first, “that on theological grounds, …to profess Christian faith implies a willingness to grow together with fellow believers whose ethnicities, languages, and cultures are different from my own….to be Christian is to imitate Christ’s open-armed embrace of Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, barbarian, Scythian, African, European, Latino, Asian. To be Christian is, furthermore, not to reserve for oneself the role of host, the one who sets the table, but to learn to see Christ in others, to receive correction from them, to be joined to them, to learn from the stranger.” (p. 145, 146).

Smith’s insights into the biblical story are supported by his experiences as a teacher of German language and culture, his experiences as a stranger to North American culture, and his wide travels around the globe. He persuasively argues that learning other languages and cultures is a task for everyone, not just those who hope to serve as cross-cultural missionaries.

I highly recommend this book to any person or organization who is looking for a biblically grounded way to think about the growing multicultural nature of our lives and our work. It’s a challenging, and very helpful book that points us in the right direction as we struggle to understand what it means to “love our neighbor.”



If there is one book about kids that you should consider reading in the next few months, I would recommend that you dive into NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.  The authors take a chapter each to explore ten subjects related to kids, analyze the related research, and present conclusions that challenge conventional thinking. Chapter topics include praise, sleep, race, lying, kindergarten, siblings, teen rebellion, self-control, playing with others, and infant language skills.

The conclusions in this book should provoke healthy and productive discussion among K-12 teaching faculty at school or church, parenting groups, or husbands and wives.  The authors have done a great service in synthesizing a wide range of research, field interview material, and resources into an enjoyable and readable book that will appeal to a wide range of adults who work with and nurture children and youth.

“I know only one thing about the technologies that await us in the future. We will find ways to tell stories with them.” - Jason Ohlar.

On Friday I had the pleasure to return to the beautiful isle of Islay to lead  a staff development day on Literacy with the staff of Islay High School and its associated primary schools. Like most of the profession in Scotland at the moment they are beginning to realise the significant implications of the  Curriculum for Excellence reforms, and are wrestling with some of the central issues, such as the notion of literacy development as the responsibility of all, and what that might look like in practical terms.

I hope I was able to demonstrate that the development of literacy is quite explicit in all of the curriculum frameworks, so in a sense there is no escaping that responsibility, no matter what sector you work in or what subject you teach, but the challenges for primary and secondary teachers are quite different, something which I will return to in another blog post. In the meantime, however, if people are to embrace that responsibility, the whole school community, including parents, must first come to a common understanding of what it is to be literate in 2010, what it might mean to be literate in 2020 and beyond, and to develop a common language around it. Here is an outline of my initial presentation to the staff - I would welcome your thoughts on it:

• The definition of  ’literacy’ in Curriculum for Excellence is “the set of skills which allows an individual to engage fully in society and in learning, through the different forms of language which society values and finds useful.” 
• The Literacy framework recognises that the meaning of ‘text’ has to include the huge range of texts with which we engage on a daily basis, and that we should use a range of texts to reflect  this in our learning and teaching.
• We live in a society where the image is becoming the dominant means of communication, and where once we used pictures to illustrate our written texts, increasingly we are using written text to illustrate the pictures.
• Most of us engage with moving image texts more than any other form of text in any given day, so the development of literacy skills in young people should recognise that fact.
• What links all of these texts is that they are all a form of narrative, so when we develop literacy skills in young people what we are developing is the set of skills which will enable them to engage critically with the range of narratives which are in the world, and to be able to construct their own effective narratives.
• As teachers we also learn, and teach, through narratives, and the quality of the narrative will determine the effectiveness of the learning. To put it simply, there is a range of ways to tell a story, and we should use all the tools at our disposal to make it as good a story as possible, whether the story is a fictional one, or the story of Ohm’s Law, or the story of the First World War.

I would like to thank the staff on Islay for engaging so willingly and positively with some tough questions and activities, including subjecting themselves to a spelling test! You are in a very good place, literally and metaphorically,to show the rest of us how collaborative working is the only way we can make progress, how new technologies make it easier for us to share both ideas and information, and how the the new vision of the curriculum is much more dependent on the quality of the relationships in a community and not about mechanical processes. Slainte!

To see all the photographs from the event click here.

Teachers are told that they need to be on the cutting edge of technology and be able to use them in class.  What happens when the students know more then the teachers?  Should teacher not be afraid to learn from their students? 

Teachers need to stay current with the technology that students are already using and looking ahead to technologies that they will be using in the future. 

Districts should help keep teachers up to date with the lastest technology, but do they?

Students today are digital learners.  Teachers need to be willing to change their teaching styles and engage their students more.