School Change Collaborative
Workshop Activities to Promote Dialog About Learning Communities
This section includes workshop activities that have been used to stimulate inquiry. These materials were designed to enable participants to practice some concepts and skills needed to develop a learning community in a school. The section includes information on:
- Potential Impact of Storytelling
- Storytelling enables us to learn with one another—rather than from one another. Sharing a story sets a different tone than making a presentation. To tell a story, you do not need to set yourself up as an expert on a topic; you just need to know what has touched you. Stories are most instructive if we learn to probe into their meanings.
- Instructions for Individual Storytelling
- This workshop activity asks each person to tell a story that personalizes their experiences with learning communities.
- Characteristics of Learning Communities
- Summary used for individual storytelling (workshop overhead/handout)
- Inquiry and Its Relation to School Improvement
- What are important characteristics of successful inquiry for school reform?
- Dialogue
- Description of dialogue, including its
benefits, helpful ideas for starting a group dialogue, and
reflective questions a school staff can use to review the success of
their own attempts at dialogue
- Overheads: This material is provided for use in overhead slides.
- Questioning as dialogue or advocacy: Purpose of dialog and sample question stems for inquiry.
- Reminders about what it takes to dialogue: Guidelines for successful dialogue.
- Data Gathering Skills
- In addition to inquiry and dialogue skills, school change workshops need to provide school staff with the opportunities for other kinds of learning, like self study skills.
- Implementation Skills
- Creating the Future Workshop
- NWREL's Reflections on Self-Study
- Reflections on the purposes of self-study. Notes from a discussion of self-study in a School Improvement Process.