Archive for November, 2009

St. Martins - workshop 5: communication and feedback

Published by Matthew on November 17, 2009 in News. Closed

We started our last session with a fun variation on a name game, before discussing last week’s homework question: “Where would better communications be useful in your life?” This shed some light on some communications in school that could be improved.

The main point I wanted to cover in this session was how important it is for the listener to check their understanding of a communication. This simple skill prevents many common communication issues from arising.

We played a version of the ‘broken telephone game’, where people whispered the message around the circle and we see how close they are to the original transmission at the end. We then played it again but this time the listeners related back to the whisperers what they had heard.

Next we moved on to play a variation on a game from last week, where we role-played various scenarios to practise communication. The key point was to cleanly and fully summarise your partner’s communication.

This marked the end of the workshop topics, and we spent the remaining 20 minutes doing feedback; questionnaires, the mindset dot feedback from the first workshop, and a few people recorded some video clips as well.

We’re just starting to look at the results of the feedback, but some of it is very promising. Here is a composite photo of the mindset feedback that we ran before the first workshop and after the last. It shows people’s beliefs in their ability to change various aspects about themselves. After the last workshop people showed a marked increase in their beliefs about being able to change!

St. Martins - workshop 4: motivation and communication

Published by Matthew on November 4, 2009 in News. Closed

Continuing from last week’s motivation theme; we split into 2 groups and played a game of boggle. This illustrated how competition can be a form of motivation, and one that we can artificially add.

We had a QA session and drew a mindmap that collected our ideas about motivation. We considered last week’s question about building motivation in areas where we are not naturally attracted to. This grew into a discussion about being motivated in school, the use of praise and rewards.

We then moved on to the communication part of the workshop. We started by playing a game where blindfolded people were led to a part of the room and had to be guided back to a chair by their sighted partners. The aim of the game was to get people into the space of really listening and being guided to a destination. In communication we can often assume we know what the other person means, and we may miss their real message.

We had a QA session on ‘what is good communication like’ and had some interesting answers, including some great metaphors like airport control towers and airline pilots. I introduced the idea of the listener summarising the communication back to the talker to check that the communication was on target.

To practice this, we split into 3s and each 3 rotated around the roles of coach, talker and listener. It was the listener’s job to clearly summarise what the talker’s issue was.

The homework question this week was “Where would better communications be useful in your life?”