Month: May 2019

Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds

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Coexist. Flickr by Robert Engberg.

Communicating ideas is fundamental to my work (and most people’s, I suppose). So when Jennifer Gonzalez, over at The Cult of Pedagogy, did a post about Presentation Zen, I knew I needed to read it. I create slide decks for the classes I teach, the conferences I present at, the dissertation I will eventually defend…

“A good oral presentation is different than a well-written document, and attempts to merge them result in poor presentations and poor documents” (p.13).

Based on Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, Reynolds writes about six aptitudes: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.

Design starts at the beginning: “consider your topic and your objectives, your key messages, and your audience. Only then will you begin to sketch out ideas that will appear in some digital visual form later” (p.16). Continue reading “Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds” →

Post-Semester Teaching Reflections

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From Getting Ideas Into Action (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, 2011)

A week before this semester began, I was asked to teach ELPA 875, Theory and Practice in Educational Planning. This post is a summary and brief reflection of this experience and how I might improve the course in the future. The image above was a focal diagram that we returned to throughout the semester. The PDSA image comes from

Course Theme

Broadly, this is a class about planning for and effecting change in an organization. Through the lens of trying to impact change, we considered

  • Scale – district, building, classroom, learner. For example, we explored how defining problems at a large scale, such as the achievement gap, can make them feel unsurmountable and consequently disconnected from daily work. We worked to define problems in a way that was connected to our daily work and aligned with organizational goals.
  • Design – we talked about a design strategy of starting with small, iterative testing rather than large-scale changes all at once; seeing the system that produces undesired results; and considered the importance of including different perspectives – not just to be “midwest nice” – but because no one person can see all the pieces of a system,
  • Change as relational – bringing people together to solve common problems can be the work that builds a positive culture where people trust and support each other.

Continue reading “Post-Semester Teaching Reflections” →