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A Respite for Teachers
![]() An Aside: A Lecture for Teachers The lecture method was invented for the situation, back in the Dark Ages before printing, when only one copy of some book would be at the university, and the most qualified person would both read from it to the class and lecture based upon it, for the benefit of all the students who otherwise had no access to that book and its contents. A few of the relevant circumstances have changed since then. Some churches and most schools have continued the practice, though all that most classrooms need to become a religious service is a hymn or so! Even if you are wedded to the lecture method and have never "buzzed a group" in your life, you can experiment just a little. Identify the key point you've just been trying to make in your lecture and instruct your students to turn to their partner, or to "the person next to you" if you've not pre-set the class, and ask, "Between you, let's see which pair of you can come up with the best statement of this issue." Or turn your main point into a question and ask that question.
If you are shy about it, test out these rules one step at a time until you feel them working for you, and you see and are pleased with the results especially pleased with what you see happening with your students, as you manage your classroom into ever more excellent topical focus and intensity. Consider: what matters in the classroom is what is learned, not what is taught. Of what value is even the most eloquent lecture if little is learned from it? Dynamic Format lets you have it both ways. ![]() Beyond the Classroom The Board Room, the Clubhouse, City Hall Note that Robert's Rules of Order were designed to shut down communications within a group so that business can be transacted. The too-typical result leads to the joke about the hippopotamus being a horse designed by a committee. Dynamic Format, instead, elicits focused communications in a way which causes the business transacted to reflect the highest considerations and actual genius of the group.
Board meetings, annual business meetings of societies, faculty or staff
meetings, planning groups, task forces, town meetings, etc., are just as
appropriate for this set of focusing strategies. This form of participant
involvement, fostering expression from each participant's own perceptions
while sustaining a topical focus, yields results far superior to those
of the methods historically or currently in general use. ![]() Beyond Clearing the Mental Traffic Jam Focused "buzz-grouping" per Dynamic Format enables everyone to get in his/her say, so that deliberations can move forward and all participants are fully and productively engaged. Instead of sitting there bursting with things to say and mentally rehearsing what they're going to say until they can grab the floor, participants fully express themselves and are freed to listen, as well as to move forward in their thoughts and perceptions. Beyond that effect Socrates was among the first to discover that to describe a perception develops that perception further. The original schools, in classical Greece, were set up not for the benefit of students, but to provide qualified audiences for the leading thinkers and perceivers to describe their perceptions to. Socratic method is a set of techniques for getting participants to examine their inner and/or outer perceptions and to describe in detail what they discover there. The resulting peak learning experiences and "Socratic miracle leaps" phenomena which frequently occur with this kind of process, no less than the insights that come up on the couch of a good psychologist, are now easily understood in terms of modern psychology's most widely accepted or "first law": You get more of what you reinforce. Each time you describe one of your own perceptions, you
The Japanese had to teach us the American-discovered technique of product
quality control. Can we teach ourselves this form of meeting quality control,
which may well prove to be of far greater significance to us all? You have
the above simple instructions in hand, and enough information about them to
devise your own "Dynamic Format" rules, should you need different ones. The
rest is up to you. ![]() Comments to Win Wenger |
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