Josh's Adult ED

My journey through the world of adult education.

[ltbubbaert]

Quiet Please!

Being an introvert can be an angst driven existence.  Preferring deep conversation over water cooler talk about the local sports team can quickly set you apart from the crowd...and not necessarily in a good way.  And that's only one example of how introverts can feel different from their extroverted peers.  Generally speaking I have come to terms with who I am and I would tell any young introvert, "It gets better." But perhaps the biggest challenge with being a confirmed introvert is the nagging sense that somehow I don't seem to experience life like other people.  I'm perfectly happy to work quietly in my office, while others can't wait to get to the smoke shack or the after hours get together.  The book Quiet by Susan Cain has allowed me to finally stop apologizing for being an introvert.  Its ok to have a few close friends over dozens of superficial ones.  More importantly she gave me permission to stop feeling as though I was missing important social skills or an expansive social calendar that I imagined other people were enjoying.  Ms. Cain points out that 1/3 to 1/2 of all people are introverts; most of whom feel pressured to conform to the cultural expectation she terms the "Extrovert Ideal".  Ultimately Ms. Cain makes no apologies for introverts while at the same time offering no excuses for them to go out into the world, push their boundaries and pursue their life passion while remembering to take regular breaks to find and feed their inner places.  This perhaps is a lesson all of us could use, regardless of our predilections.  

Normally I write about supervision and teaching so the reader may be asking what Quiet has to do with these topics?  Well, Ms. Cain peppered her book with facts which are useful in both arenas; here are just a few of them:

Open work plans actually reduce productivity, rather than build collaboration.

People produce superior ideas while alone rather than in a group.  It is best to have people brain storm/stream alone, then bring their ideas to the group to be hashed out.

Groupwork is not the answer to all learning.  It is imperative that lesson plans include solo learning/work which compliment the group activities.

Whether you are an introvert or not I recommend that you read "Quiet".  "Introvert" is not a dirty word and being labeled one is not an insult.  It just another way of pointing out that people process their worlds differently and that's fine as long as one process does not eclipse or dismiss the other.     

[ltbubbaert]

Malcolm Knowles - The Principles of Andragogy

I recently was involved in two classes where a group of students were asked to present a snapshot of Knowles principles back to the rest of the class.  To be honest I had only a generic knowledge of Knowles principals myself.  Seeing his principals all spelled out once again solidified my thoughts that teaching and supervising are very closely linked.

Knowles principles are:

Adults are internally motivated and self-directed

Adults bring life experiences and knowledge to learning experiences 

Adults are goal oriented

Adults are relevancy oriented

Adults are practical

Adult learners like to be respected 

At a completely unrelated training event several supervisors were going over the critical elements of warrant service and the instructor (a supervisor himself) made a long point that if adult police officers are being asked to risk their lives at a search warrant then they deserve the respect of at least being told what the purpose of the warrant is instead of just being given a simple assignment.  The instructor was teaching us to expect our personnel to make reasonable decisions when the warrant inevitably does not go as planned.  Without realizing it the instructor had just spelled out the application of Knowles principles in a real world setting.

[ltbubbaert]

Dealing with Disjuncture

The word Disjuncture has many uses and variations.  I came across this word while reading about problem-based learning.  In this context disjuncture means the difference between what the student knows prior to instruction versus the new information they are currently being confronted with.  The idea is that Disjuncture serves as motivation for the student, because he/she will want to relieve themselves of the stress that disjuncture causes him/her by investigating further until s/he reaches a resolution point.  In PBL however, disjuncture can cause students great anxiety because they are simultaneously being confronted, not just with factual information, but also their views about the world, themselves and other people.  For some people this anxiety can be overwhelming.  I recently completed a proposal for my agency which would test police applicants for the ability to handle disjuncture by giving them a series of exercises to complete.  My agency discovered the need for this testing because some students could not handle the anxiety of being confronted with new facts, especially about themselves.  I think this is a critical issue because disjuncture is not just about PBL or even transformational learning, its about dealing with our humanness.

   In his book "The Birth and Death of Meaning" Ernest Becker lays out a coherent series of arguments, one of which is that, "Power for man...is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less."  Being an educator (or even a supervisor) means, in part, helping others become aware of personal and professional contradictions and confronting them.  A common human contradiction you may ask?  The person we think we are versus the person we really are.

[ltbubbaert]

Stop Treating Employees like Suspects

Police work is dominated by scanning the environment for wrongdoers.  Police officers are constantly on the prowl looking for any sign of illegal or inappropriate activity.  Ask any experienced police officer what she does when approaching a traffic light and she will tell you that she looks at the expiration dates of the tags in front of her.  In fact almost every officer has been caught by a loved one doing the same thing off duty.  And this is a good thing; its

what coops are supposed to do.  But as the off duty example indicates, shutting this system off can be next to impossible and the subject of this post.  These same walking wrongdoer detectors are supervisors and co-workers and most of them fail to shut this system off when they enter the police station.  To them supervision or working on a shift becomes not much more than scanning the workplace for error.  And as McGregor asserts in his XY Theory these internal attitudes contribute a large extent to how we view and treat others (http://www.businessballs.com/mcgregor.htm).  However, employees are not suspects.  Yes some employees commit crimes while on duty, but the overwhelming majority of people are simply trying their best and along the way commit honest errors and omissions.  And they deserve to be treated as such.  It's time we in the law enforcement profession consciously draw a distinction between the intentional law breaking we scan for on the street and basic human reality in the police station that people make mistakes.

As an example I intentionally placed an error in the above paragraph (coops instead of cops).  How much time did you spend dwelling on the error of that paragraph versus paying attention to its content? 

[ltbubbaert]

Technical Training 101

I recently had the opportunity to audit a highly technical computer class and to tell the truth I was more than a little nervous.  My expertise generally runs in the transformational-problem solving realm and I worried that my experience may be utterly useless in a detail-oriented, procedure-based classroom.  However, I quickly saw that the basic principles of learning applies across domains.  For one thing the instruction had to follow a well thought out and developed lesson plan which was in turn based on a series of objectives that eventually broke down into individual tasks (objectives based curriculum design).  Secondly, real learning began when the instructor turned the class over to the students and had them complete increasingly complex exercises based on  each major task (creating a learning environment based on new experiences for the student). Finally the students had to demonstrate satisfactory completion of the exercises before moving on (student assessment and evaluation).  When the class finished I was happy to discover the need of these three hallmarks of teaching-learning regardless of the topic.

[ltbubbaert]

The 5 Principles of Constitutional Ethics

I was putting together a police ethics class last week when I was reminded of a paper written by Capt. Tim Hegarty while he was at the National Academy.  Capt. Hegarty's paper was about the difficulties of teaching ethics because of the vagaries of the various Codes of Ethics/Honor found in policing.  Capt. Hegarty's work pointed me to a paper written by Sgt. Monica Moll of the Kent State University Police Department

 http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/archivesum07/moll.pdf

Moll in turn references the work of Howard Cohen and Micheal Feldberg in their book Power and Restraint: The Moral Dimension of Police Work.  The basic premise is this - every law enforcement officer in the country has sworn an oath to the Constitution and our Constitution is based on 5 Basic Principles.  So teaching LEOs about ethics should boil down to presenting them with these 5 Constitutional Ethical Principles/Standards which can they can then use as a practical guide in their decision making.  The 5 principles/standards are:

1) Fair Access - All citizens should have fair access to police services based on needs.

2)  Public Trust - The public gives the police their power and trusts that it will be used with restraint for public good not personal gain.

3)  Safety and Security - The purpose of enforcement is a safe and secure society, not enforcement for enforcement's sake.

4)  Teamwork - Did you know that you are part of the executive branch of government?  The Constitution sets up checks and balances which prevent officers from interpreting laws or exacting punishment.

5) Objectivity - Officers should not use their personal feeling when executing laws.

So how did the class go?  We will find out in the coming months.  

[ltbubbaert]

People are Complex

People are not objects.  And yet everyday our minds are placing the objects we come across into categories or mental file folders for easy access later.  Unfortunately this process often carries over to people.  And since our memories are stored in an emotional context, those people-labels are usually stored within an emotional file; "Todd is kinda lazy."  "Jennie is difficult."  These labels are normal and natural, but without purposeful challenges, this labeling runs the risk of souring our work relationships and classrooms.  Maybe Todd is kinda lazy, but he also an expert at interpersonal skills.  Meanwhile Jennie is the organization's resident expert on technology.  Relying unquestionably on our automatic labeling system places people into boxes that are unfair to them and us.  It can even be dangerous.  Colwell and Huth (both police officers) make the argument in their book, "Unleashing the Power of Unconditional Respect" that people-labeling blinds us to seeing the basic potential of all humans - to do great and terrible things.  Realizing this truth about people allows us to stop treating people like predicable boxes and instead approach them with the most powerful social weapon known to humankind...Sincerity. According to Colwell and Huth the only path to sincere interactions with others is through unconditional respect for their complex humanity.

http://unleashingrespect.blogspot.com/

[ltbubbaert]

The Blank Journal

Journaling is a powerful tool that provides a place for students to reflect back on their performance, ask what they did well, what they did not do well and what they are willing to do about it.  Getting students to journal can be difficult because students often don't know what they are supposed to do when starting out.  Here are some quick tips to help get your student journals on track:

1)  Time - provide time for your students to journal.  Getting it done later at home often meets with failure.

2)  Experience - journaling is a practiced skill thats takes a while for students to "get".  They need several weeks of guided practice before they begin focusing their thoughts productively. 

3)  Feedback - early attempts at journaling often fail.  Students need feedback to know if they are on or off course.

4)  Trust - even a professional journal reveals something about the writer.  It is imperative that students feel that what they write is safe with the teacher.

[ltbubbaert]

I have seen the turtle!

#problem-based #in Problem-based learning (PBL) is messy and so is the process for solving a problem.  A few police officers in my PBL class just presented the "Turtle".  It's their way of capturing the chaos!  http://www.pspbl.com/

[ltbubbaert]

The Empty Classroom

#problem-based #in Where did the students go?  They are learning by conducting research in the real world.  Welcome to Problem-based learning. http://www.pspbl.com/

[ltbubbaert]

Become a Leader in Police Training

#problem-based #in Tired of being PowerPointed to death?  Want your personal experience to count for something in the classroom?  Frustrated because your recruit training program keeps producing mediocre police officers?  Then maybe its time to check out the Police Society for Problem Based Learning.  We are having a conference starting July 17th in Durham, NC.  If you go you will gain access to some of the best adult education practice and practitioners in and out of policing.  Check out the following links for more information:      http://www.pspbl.com/ http://www.pspbl.com/pdf/PolicePBLBook2007.pdf

[ltbubbaert]

The Big Meeting

#problem-based #in

Tired of sending memos that go nowhere, or how about that big meeting that gets off track, leaves people feeling ambushed or fails to influence the right power brokers.  Instead of one "go for broke" document/meeting try having mini-meetings.  Start with an informal meeting in somebody's office.  Pitch some rough ideas and ask what the other people in the room think.  The key here is to be relaxed and open while maintaining a rough idea of an objective or end game.  Avoid the temptation of thinking too far too early or trying to get people to like "your" plan, better yet don't have a personal plan; just some rough objective based talking points.  Allow the group to develop a plan gradually.  Repeat this process a few times with a few groups.  By now you should have a basic outline of what you want to propose; an outline that several people have had a voice in.  Now is the time to start putting this outline into a rough visual presentation.  Remember that meetings are really classrooms where you are trying to educate others about the proposal.  Most failure occurs because others don't see what you see, so take your time and build a presentation (or class if you like) around the big three learning styles (visual, tactile and auditory).  Next start pitching the outline, using the basic presentation you put together, at specific "stakeholder" meetings.  Now start working on the power brokers.  Get a couple of major players in a room and informally present what is now a fairly well tuned package.  Be prepared to adjust your presentation as you are giving it based on the feedback you receive.  Some managers will want lots of detail, others will not.  By now you should have a solid foundation of people who are familiar with the proposal and are buzzing about it.  Now is the time for one of the power brokers to have a side conversation with one of the big bosses.  This gets their interest peaked, makes them feel in the know and allows the power broker to report back any concerns that big boss may have communicated.  Finally it is time for the big meeting; oh wait you already had the big meeting, everyone in the room knows what you are going to talk about, you presentation is well practiced, you can anticipate questions/friction points and best of all no one feels out of the loop or ambushed in the meeting.  The key question to ask yourself is, "Does everyone in the room know basically what I am about to talk about?"  If the answer is yes you will probably find success.  I'm sure there are many models which explain the above process more succinctly.  In my mind it is just an operationalized version of Steve Covey's Circle of Influence https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit1.php .

[ltbubbaert]

The Great Empathy

#problem-based #in

Howard Gardner's work in Multiple Intelligence is not just a way to think about how people are smart or even how they learn; it is also a great opportunity to see the world through another person's eyes - the great empathy.  At their core, teaching and supervising involve trying to see the world through other people eyes.  Because in order to coach others we have to in some part see as they see.  Example:  I live in the mid-west and often teach about emotions.  When talking about the lower parts of the brain responsible for emotions, its easy to use terms like "monkey brain", "early brain" or "animal brain".  However, many of the people in the audience have strong beliefs about the origins of life.  Why would I risk losing my audience by using terms that violate the tenets of their world view when all I have to do is use terms like the "low road", "emotional brain" or "limbic system".  Being sensitive to the learner's "intelligence", world view or the context in which they process information allows us to influence them.

[ltbubbaert]

Rules of Workplace Conflict

#pbl #in

Conflict is often thought of as negative and something to avoid, especially in the classroom or workplace.  However, conflict is often be the result of professionals who possess passion and experience debating about a subject; and professionals rarely agree on anything, usually because both sides are partially right.  However, conflicts can easily spiral out of control.  So what to do?  How about some basic rules of conflict:

1)  No name calling.

2)  Argue with your points not with the person.

3)  Don't try to win.

4)  Monitor emotions and agree to disagree if you have to.

5)  Value the relationship more than the point.

I think Sesame Street says it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl3e-OUnavQ

[ltbubbaert]

One Tool for Critical Thinking

#pbl #in

Want to improve collaboration? Then suspend your judgement.  Quickly forming our own opinions about an issue may on the surface seem decisive and efficient.  Indeed in a crisis situation, rapidly scanning the environment, examining a few critical cues and taking action based on this limited information is the hallmark of experts under pressure.  However the overwhelming majority of the situations we encounter do not require emergency actions.  Instead our daily lives are full of situations which require careful study and help from others if we hope to take the most appropriate course of action.  One powerful method to assist your thinking is to push yourself to suspend your judgements about a person or a situation.  This is best accomplished by catching yourself talking over someone else or otherwise in a great hurry to make a point.  By waiting for the right moment and allowing a conversation to take its natural course, you may be shocked by the number of times you find that most of the people in the room are really saying what you were thinking or are even offering an even better solution.  Suspending judgement will also help you in your relationships with students and employees by allowing them an honest opportunity to defend their thoughts and actions before taking corrective measures.  Suspending judgement is a major tool in critical thought because it requires the thinker to acknowledge that absolute reality does not rest in any one person, lest of all us.   http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766

[ltbubbaert]

Begin with the End in Mind

#pbl #in

When building a class or preparing to counsel an employee it is of utmost importance to remember the above principle from Steve Covey (http://www.amazon.com/The-8th-Habit-Effectiveness-Greatness/dp/0684846659).  As an educator or supervisor it is so easy to get stuck writing out ideas, plans and exercises before clearly thinking about the purpose and objectives of your task.  Instead, start any project by lining out your objectives first.  Sometimes even this task can seem oppressive, so here is a simple trick.  Ask someone familiar with the situation to list the three or five most important things that a person should get out of the course (if teaching) or the counseling session (if supervising).  People can usually do this very easily.  In the case of an employee you may be told: "Jim needs to know how he is being perceived; He needs to stop talking on the phone and get his work done; and he needs to stop bothering Karen."  Wham!  you just got your objectives.  From here you will be able to direct all your thinking to these three issues.  By staying focused on simply stated, core objectives you will increase the likelihood that your work will accomplish what you set out to accomplish.        

[ltbubbaert]

The Roots of Angry Outbursts

#pbl #in

We all have experienced an episode of anger that left us feeling bewildered and embarassed.  That was my experience this last weekend.  I was at Starbucks with my kids when they began arguing with each other about throwing away a piece of trash.  I stepped into the fray and decided to have a sit down talk about the situation.  However, my children would have none of it.  Despite my best authoritative instruction, the piece of trash was thrown into a nearby waste basket in view of a store full of people.  We then proceded outside where I calculated my next step.  After the doors to the car closed I began yelling at my kids about their poor behavior.  I remember thinking at the time, "But I'm not a yeller; why am I doing this?"  It only later that I realized what made me so mad.  My children had threatened my sense of authority and done it in front of others.  It was all to easy for my brain to interpret the situation as a personal attack (thanks amygdala!).  Though it did not help me much at the time; thinking about this situation allowed me to realize what had happened, thus making it more likely for me to identify when it is happening again and stop the emotional hijacking. http://www.myevt.com/news/retrain-your-brain-learn-amygdala-hijack