Reflections on the Course I Just Finished Teaching

I haven’t written a post since the end of January when I told you about the course on which I was embarking.  Here, and in the next few posts, are some of my reflections. 

The course I told you about at the end of January has filled my mind and my days.  It ended last week and has been a joyous, if hard slogging, ride.  I loved the design of the course – from the flow from high level skills overviews, through the focus on three ways to view human systems that are placed in and interact with the environment, the team projects and our 11 amazing speakers, including a panel of four from the Flats Forward Project.  The students in this MBA course were top-notch and delivered high quality projects to their clients in a celebratory last class. 

One change from the original concept was clarity about not designing solutions.  The effective and ethical thing to do when faced with a problem that spans one or more boundaries, is to design a solution process, or even just the start of a solution process.  Old-fashioned values of flexibility and basing information on data were frustrating, but cheerfully accepted as redesign. 

The students in this class came away with a sense of their place in our community, hope for our future and a personal sense of efficacy – of being designers of the future.  For my part, I’ve become more convinced about the relevance of resilience models to problem solving and community enhancement.   

Teaching this course made my heart sing!  I love designing learning events and processes and I got to do my favorite thing 15 times in 15 weeks.  Heaven!  Now, on to more reflections about resilience!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Urban and Rural Paradigms

This post was originally written in January of 2012. This morning I attended a forum on the controversy surrounding horizontal fracking. The session was offered by a community minded church to educate the public   on the issues involved in the controversy. The panel was well-organized, prepared and diverse.  The hosts had invited people from the energy/fracking industry to come, but they declined.  So, it seemed that a fairly homogenous crowd gathered - homogenous in this case meaning urbanites against fracking.  Now, with my background in dangerous manufacturing, I’m sure that there are ways to safely extract gas from shale. If we apply OSHA-like regulations to the storage of the wastewater, then that storage could be done safely as well.   However, I'm really skeptical of energy companies’ willingness to protect people and the environment without regulation and mandated accountability requiring them to do so.  But something e...
Read more

New Leader Integration Process

Are you the new leader of a company or department?   Are you about to hire a new leader for your firm?   Would you like to accelerate this transition and realize amazing enthusiasm for what’s next?   Here are the steps one manufacturing plant took to get their new plant manager, and everyone else, up to speed. First, the new leader, Pat, and the management team wrote responses to a confidential survey to get their expectations and issues out on the table.   This process made sure the new leader and the whole team would be aware of and address the “real” issues in the plant that crop up every day.   Confidentiality meant the tough, politically difficult questions could be asked:   1.   Is there anything you need to know from Pat right away in order to do your job better? 2.   What do you want Pat to know about the direct report team? 3.   How do you feel about being a member of this team? 4.   What is the organizational "secret" ...
Read more