Betha Gutsche

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Posts by Betha Gutsche

What would Seinfeld do?

I love the image of the fantasy eager student in Cathy Moore’s Dump the Drone. This learning nerd looks blissfully at his computer screen and exclaims, “I love to sit at my computer and read read read!”

If only training were that easy. Whether it’s online or on-ground, for most training sessions, the audience is a little lower down on the engagement scale. They may be skeptical that the session will be of any benefit to them; or they may feel obligated but not motivated to be there. I’ve been cogitating on just that kind of situation, fretting about an upcoming presentation. I want to prepare myself and my audience in advance to set the stage for success. I wondered what would Seinfeld do? Or what would any comedian with years of experience in front of tough audiences do? So, I googled for lessons from the world of comedy. Whether or not these comedians are memorable, their advice is:

1. Where’s the passion?

If passion is contagious, the converse—a passionless presentation—is deadly. If you’re not jazzed about delivering your material, how can you expect your audience to be? Simon Dunn says, if you’re dying on stage, “you’ve only got yourself to blame.” Vince Martin tells wannabe comics that you need to bring the energy to the audience yourself, “to give away as much energy as you can.”

How to surface your enthusiasm? Back in December, Peter Bromberg (who’s a bit of a comic himself)  blogged about Kevin Eikenberry’s post on Unlocking the Passion Paradox. Read it and then go look for your passion. “Passion is something we want, but we don’t always know how or where to find it.”

2. You talkin’ to me?

When asked by Larry King what makes a comedian really good, Seinfeld replied that it was a comedian who cared about his audience. Comedians will often sit at the back of a club before their act just so they can watch people enter and note their dress, demeanor, and demographic. The more you understand about your audience, the better prepared you are to play to their diversity, arouse their attention and respond to their tough questions. But Seinfeld didn’t say “understand,” he said “care” about the audience.

Trainers often have an advantage over stand-up comics in that they know ahead of time who is registered for the event; you can do your audience analysis before the moment when you’re standing in the spotlights. You can look for their commonalities, their differences, anticipate potential questions and formulate answers. But take it a step further and try to imagine their frame of mind when arriving at the training. What might they be expecting, what might disappoint, how will they have the opportunity to interact and make the material their own?

3. What’s the matter?

John Cleese says, “If you get too neurotic about making mistakes, you’re unlikely to make anything.” Anticipating a tough audience or a difficult training can be stifling. The fear of not connecting, not achieving learning objectives, and basically “bombing” makes it hard to prepare for a presentation. You need to let go of some control. Be prepared to be flexible in response to your audience and to change gears when it’s clear that something’s not working. Vinnie Favorito is known for extemporizing with his audiences. He’s also been known, when meeting with tepid response and weak laughs, to stop his routine and ask “Guys, what’s the matter? What’s going on?” It’s more important to admit that there’s a disconnect and enlist the audience to help fix it than it is to stick to a script.

Well, that’s three good pointers to calm my trepidation and help me prepare. There’s a whole other set of lessons on how to pull off the live performance. That will require a lot more study and practice.

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Under the Influencer

Influencer--the bookI’ve read three books this year that have made me rethink approaches to teaching and presentation: Made to Stick, Brain Rules, and now Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Influencer is about sources and strategies of influence that effect significant change in people and communities. Teaching is influencing. The application of the ideas in this book to leading and learning is potent.

Influencer is threaded with stories that reinforce the authors’ ideas. The most powerful story is that of the Delancey Street Foundation, a “self-help organization for substance abusers, ex-convicts, homeless and others who have hit bottom.” Their successes are all the more inspiring for the enormity of the challenges and intractable behaviors to be overcome. The challenge of training library staff and guiding them through change seems totally attainable by comparison.

You really need to read the book to get the full development of the processes. I’ll just highlight some key takeaways, with a few Delancey Street examples.

Outcome is good but behavior is vital

This was a light bulb revelation for me—that focusing on outcomes is not the best way to achieve them. Outcomes are certainly desirable but they’re not concrete enough. For someone who is trying to kick a drug habit, the outcome is to become drug-free. That’s a noble goal, but it so often succumbs to failure. A person needs a whole lot more than the target outcome to achieve success; he has to know exactly what to do. The individual must learn the day-to-day, minute-to-minute behaviors that need to change every step of the way between addicted and clean.

Strong influencers take the focus on behavior a step further and identify the vital behaviors that are pivotal to unlocking a flood of change. Changing just a few key behaviors can cause problems to “topple like a house of cards.”

At Delancey Street, “the hardest thing we do here is to get rid of the code of the street. It says: ‘Care only about yourself, and don’t rat on anyone.’ If you reverse those two behaviors, you can change everything else.”

When deviance is desirable

An effective method for identifying those vital behaviors is to look for “positive deviance.” Who is achieving success against the odds and what are they doing that differs from the norm? Once the unique behaviors are filtered out, test them to see if they can be replicated with other communities.

Get personal

“Personal experience is the mother of all cognitive map changers.” Great teachers and presenters can certainly be verbally persuasive, moving an audience to open their minds and think differently about a topic. But real learning involves some actual change in behavior, and that happens most readily from direct experience. At Delancey Street, any attempt at preaching values or making eloquent verbal appeals may be met with a reactive volley of profanity. Residents make progress by doing, by putting into practice new behaviors before they even understand the full intent of what they’re doing and what they’re supposed to be learning from their actions.

Eat the elephant one bite at a time

The phrase is becoming a cliché but I still love the image it conjures. When the challenge to change looks enormous, when the learning curve looks impossibly steep, just get out your fork and dig in one bite at a time. For Delancey Street residents, the bite of the elephant may be as small as learning to set a table—first get the fork in the right place, then the knife ….

You can sign up for a free account with the Influencer website and download the Influencer Worksheet to help plan your next training initiative. However, it probably won’t make enough sense until you’ve read the book. If every library trainer reads and implements Influencer ideas, will we be riding on the top of a tidal wave of positive change?

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Curiosity Rules!

Phrenology bustI am fascinated by brain science, or I could say my brain is fascinated. There is a heightened and growing knowledge of how that astounding organism really works. As I’m reading John Medina’s Brain Rules (the book, which goes much deeper than the website), I keep thinking of the recent study released by the Department of Education, which compares the effectiveness of face-to-face, online, and blended learning delivery. The meta-analysis of over 1000 studies conducted between 1996 and 2008 seems to provide a solid basis for the conclusion that online instruction is “more effective in improving student achievement than the purely face to face instruction.” I wasn’t all that surprised by the findings, but I wonder if the basic comparison is all that meaningful. Is it the online versus face-to-face dichotomy that is the important distinction? Or is it innovative versus traditional approaches that make a difference in a person’s learning?

Levine neuro-developmental systems.There is often an underlying presumption that the traditional, on-ground classroom offers a quality instructional experience. I can attest that I have had very inferior f2f classes and I’m sure I’m not alone. Even with a good instructor, there are serious limitations to traditional teaching methods. When I returned to graduate school in mid-life, I was dismayed to realize what a struggle it is for my brain to absorb auditory information delivered in a 1-2 hour lecture format. Having read Dr. Mel Levine’s A Mind at a Time just before entering grad school, I grasped that I wasn’t stupid—it’s just that my learning strengths did not mesh with this age-old form of teaching. Levine identifies eight key neuro-developmental systems of the brain, illustrated here. Individual variation in the strength of these systems is huge; a math “genius” may be strong in sequential ordering yet dismal in social thinking; a socially gregarious person may be strong in language but weak in higher thinking. Our traditional educational system emphasizes attention controls and higher thinking and undervalues social thinking and spatial controls. As Medina says, “our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home.” Levine’s work has generated a non-profit organization that seeks to deliver knowledge to All Kinds of Minds.

In the Online Learning Study, the front-runner was actually the blend of face-to-face and online. I would guess that the blended approach provides the greatest variety of learning options, allowing learners to engage their strongest neuro-developmental systems. And perhaps purely online delivery won out over f2f because instructional designers are trying harder to be innovative and deploying more tools to address different learning styles. I’m not comfortable with Secretary of Education Anne Duncan’s summary of the report that we need to “incorporate digital content into everyday classes.” It’s not the digital component alone that provides the learning magic. There are many teachers in on-ground classrooms who are experimenting with new strategies to engage students in-person.

Medina sums up his book with this declaration:

“The greatest Brain Rule of all is something I cannot prove or characterize, but I believe in it with all my heart ….it is the importance of curiosity.”

We need to be designing learning to stimulate and satisfy curiosity. Whether that is accomplished online or in-person is secondary to the essential Brain Rule.

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