This newsletter covers what happened in May and will give you a heads up on what to look for in June and the months following.

In this issue:

We are envisioning another level for the Academy of Process Educators while living through a period of significant societal change. Over the past few months, we have been dealing with change — both individually and collectively. Not the normal life changes, but a dramatic change due to an unanticipated virus. And while we are accustomed to managing everyday changes in our personal lives, professional situations, and communities, this shift has provided a challenge. It has required that we contain our sense of loss and be proactive in maintaining balance, providing support, and planning for the future.

Likewise, the Academy has adjusted to a new normal over the past few months. Members have collaborated on delivering the annual conference in an online environment while continuing to work on significant initiatives such as the self-growth community and strategic planning. They have cooperated around various projects, initiatives, and plans to create opportunities and paths for others to join in actualizing planning or designing systems. The Academy is working to benefit the next generation of Process Educators. It is a change process that builds on the existing culture of learning, self-growth, and cooperation in strengthening our infrastructure and outcomes. It is a process that is holistic, requiring thoughtful, collaborative inquiry, and teamwork. The Academy’s change process is deliberate and integrative. We are challenging ourselves to higher levels of effectiveness by encouraging organizational learning and high performance by integrating technical and process skills at the individual, group, and organization levels. We are setting visions of transformation with goals that stretch us. We believe that we will be successful. As Napoleon Hill stated, "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Thank you for conceiving a new future and preparing foundations for the next generation of the Academy of Process Educators.

Be safe and stay well.

Joann

Did you know that the minutes of the Academy Board Meetings are available to ALL Academy members? In this article, we offer highlights of the most recent board meeting(s):

April 2020 minutes (not yet approved)        May 2020 minutes (not yet approved)

Items Under Review

There are two items under review that will be brought before the board in June - please make sure you review and come to the board meeting to vote.

Item 1: New timeline/procedures for officers and directors to create and report their annual plans.

Item 2: A resolution (posted in the April minutes) that would allow the President to conduct critical board business outside of normal board meetings.

Our PE Conference Goes Online

The annual conference is coming up — please register.  Hope to see you there!

The Next Board Meeting:  June 10, 2020 (10:30 am Eastern)

ALL Academy Members are welcome to join us! Please check the Academy Member site for the ZOOM information you'll need to join the meeting!

Thanks to the tireless work of our committee members, collaborators, and presenters, we are pleased to announce that the 2020 Conference design process has been completed. The conference Schedule is posted on our web site. We will indeed be inspired and grow in this new online learning environment. To be sure, the COVID-19 Pandemic, while tragic, has also inspired innovation, growth, and a shared commitment to the future all across the planet. We should be humbled and inspired by the ingenuity and persistence demonstrated by our colleagues throughout our Academy. 

The Conference schedule features Plenary Sessions, Keynote Speakers, as well as Breakout Sessions (synchronous & asynchronous) on each day. The Hall of Innovation (Poster Sessions) will be pre-recorded and available asynchronously on Friday. To expand opportunities for participation beyond the normal confines of the three days of the Conference, additional Professional Development workshops in both synchronous and asynchronous sessions will be available before and after the conference. More information to come on this later.

We hope you plan to participate in this vigorous and engaging conference. To do so we encourage everyone to immediately head to the Academy Website and Register for the best $100 bargain of the summer. Remember the rate goes up to $150 after June 1st.

To assist all conference presenters in final preparations for the conference, our technical support team has created two online sessions as an orientation to the conference environment. They are scheduled on June 9 from 7-8:30 pm Eastern. To register for this critical workshop and more information please visit: http://www.processeducation.org/pd.html

To introduce all conference participants to the unique online environment we have also created an orientation workshop for participants just one week prior to the Conference, on June 18 at 5 pm Eastern. Register for this workshop will open soon on the website.

For more conference details check the Academy web site at: http://www.processeducation.org

The Self-Growth Community has been helping folks prepare for the Self-Growth Institute, June 20-24, coming up right before the 2020 PE Conference. I'm excited to return to this Institute as a team mentor, and look forward to supporting many of you in this experience!

Last year's Self-Growth Institute gave me a huge leap in learning, growth, and self-growth performance. It launched me on a year of change — taking ownership of my professional life and pursuing independent educational consulting, deciding I was ready to date, and committing to more hiking than ever before. And more recently, like all of us, I've been navigating life in a COVID-19 world.

The skills that I gained and grew at the Institute were instrumental in advancing all of these areas. The Institute created opportunity for focusing on growing a mentoring skill each day, and the full set of skills have continued to benefit me throughout the year. As a newly-minted educational consultant, I have worked on encouraging ownership, both for myself in forging this path, and with my clients as I seek to produce value for the programs they want to advance.  This work has required self-challenging, because I frequently need to step out of my comfort zone. By developing action plans, I create the steps I’ll take to achieve each goal and outcome. Action plans were also critical for achieving my hiking goal; for the past five years I'd never structured the time for these excursions to happen.

Quarantine times have been a challenge for everyone I know. This is where I’ve really employed mentoring skills for coaching myself.  First, getting unstuck helped me stop reading the news and looking at state, national, and world data, and choose to take actions in my areas of work. Initially I tended toward evaluating my performance, but knew that I needed to employ being fair to recognize that I, like millions of others, was seeking to cope with uncertainty beyond what we have ever experienced. Thus, I had to step back, establishing standards that were realistic for this time, which made highlighting substandard performance for myself an opportunity for being nonjudgmental and transforming strategies to move forward.

The Self-Growth Institute will be an opportunity for every participant to take their own leap forward in their self-growth journey! I hope that all of you can join us for what will be a challenging and rewarding experience!

P.S.  I met a guy the day after I returned from the Self-Growth Institute. For the first time in my life, I asked him to take me on a date. And that guy is making dinner in my kitchen right now!

One of the processes we both had difficulty with when teaching was when and how to do constructive interventions with teams. We believe that growing capability to constructively intervene to increase the quality of learning, performance, facilitation, and assessment is central to being an effective process educator. To help faculty improve their facility with this process, we collaboratively wrote the two Faculty Guidebook (FGB) (2007) modules “Constructive Intervention (CI)” and “Constructive Intervention Techniques.” These were based on ten key principles intended to raise practitioners’ consciousness of the multiple frames of reference that can be applied when constructively intervening.

Since 2007 PE theory and practice has evolved within a new framework based on growth and self-growth (Leise, et al., 2020; in progress) In addition, the publication of the 2019 Classification of Learning Skills (Leise et al. 2019; IJPE) added a significantly expanded learning skills resource (from 256 in 2007 to 509 in 2019). “Growth” skills (a set of 40 from the CLS), and “mentoring” skills (a set of 37) have been clearly identified. Constructive intervention can be applied with much greater clarity for strengthening growth and self-growth (self-mentoring) in any context.

The FGB modules include some key concepts such as “limiting skills” and “mastery stories” that are especially notable. In order to use CI effectively it is essential to identify impediments that are restraining growth in any learning skill. (See The Professional’s Guide to Self-Growth and “Key Learner Characteristics for Academic Success", 2016, IJPE.) Success with CI is enhanced when a performance area (which will include multiple skills) is clearly described ahead of time and mastery stories are written to help with imagining what opportunities for intervention may look like from both learner and educator perspectives.

It is quite exciting to realize that the work we did back in 2007 is still valid today. Even better, it is obvious that a lot of innovative thought and research is expanding the “tool kit” that we struggled to describe more than a decade ago. We hope you will take a look at the CI modules and reflect on how to use the principles and tools while integrating all the new information and practices since then.

Why attend?

PE Academy members value interaction with colleagues to mutually foster learning and growth. These sessions have been created to help conference session facilitators and attendees design, present, and participate in online synchronous sessions for the 2020 PE Conference. Specifically, the sessions will model how to design your online conference session as a Process Education activity to achieve these goals using Zoom and the PE Conference Forums.

This is a previously scheduled Academy Professional Development event date, repurposed to help you contribute towards creating the best possible conference experience for our community.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020 @ 7:00-8:30pm, Eastern (Parts A&B)

Click to visit the workshop page for this workshop!

ZOOM INFORMATION is available on the

Academy Member site in the Workshops section.

Part A (PE Conference Session Design and Preparation): Practice using the PE PD session model to create easily accessible resources along with simple, yet challenging and rewarding, online activities supporting participant learning and growth during your PE Conference session.

Part B (Facilitating PE Conference Sessions using Zoom and the Conference Forums): Utilize the PE conference technology effectively to foster learning and growth by using breakouts for teamwork, forums for recording, etc. This session will utilize the Zoom Tips Sheet and the PE Conference Forum(s).

Prepare for the Workshop
•    Visit the workshop page and complete the REQUIRED reading and answer the Exploration Questions PRIOR to the workshop!

(Register for the workshop on the Workshop page or on the main Professional Development page.)

As I write this (May 15th), I’m missing the last day of a career enhancing workshop, that to add insult to injury, is in my hometown where my oldest son still lives and I have many friends. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m missing it. I withdrew when my university cancelled all travel, and it may or may not be going on. Earlier, April 3rd through the 6th, I missed my absolute favorite conference (sorry fellow process educators) in my absolute favorite city, Las Vegas. I’m sure that many of you have had a similar spring. Many of your colleagues have as well.

It’s nice to travel. It’s nice to see our friends and associates. It’s wonderful to learn new things. We have an opportunity, in 20 days, to salvage some of that. Pacific Crest is running a Self-Growth Institute June 20th through 24th. It promises to be an intense learning experience. Immediately afterwards the Annual Process Education Conference takes place. Both are entirely online.

I know that you all are aware of this. Some of you have made plans to be a part of it. Some of you have not. I would like to encourage you to attend and contribute, for your own social well being. I’d like to encourage you to bring a friend, or two, or more. You know they’re not doing anything else. And if your university has a budget for conferences, these are a bargain. After all, there are no plane tickets, no hotel bills, and no meal reimbursements. Due to circumstances beyond our control this has become the most affordable high value opportunity of the summer. This is a great opportunity to expand our organization. I wish you well.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE & REGISTER!

We are pleased to now feature blog content from Richard Stone... Thanks, Rick! You're welcome to visit his blog as well and fill out the contact form on his site if you'd like to subscribe to his weekly blog.

It’s virtually impossible to understand our neurobiology without taking into account how human brains are wired for story, and story in turn powerfully impacts our biological response to the world around us, whether it’s “real” (we‘ll delve into whether there is such a thing as a “real” world out there later) or one we have simply imagined to be so. It would seem story and our brains are engaged in a well-choreographed, hypnotic, symbiotic dance.

Anthropologists and psychologists have turned their attention to this tango of story and brain, attempting to discern its central value to our species. Some would suggest it all has to do with social cohesion. How do we get a large group of people living in precarious circumstances where survival isn’t assured to march to the same drummer for their mutual benefit? In many pre-literate cultures stories detailing onerous consequences for not cooperating and tangible benefits for working together became a relatively effective means of teaching children what was acceptable behavior and what was out of bounds. Stories were also an effective means to encourage social cooperation and how to manage complex communal relations, allowing us to create a mental model of others, their personalities, their behavioral quirks, all in the service of predicting how they’ll react in particular circumstances. As Robin Dunbar suggests,

…it is likely that the reason we need our large brains is to house not only mental models of those whom we know, but also the models of others’ models of other people and ourselves. Stories told as anecdotes and gossip, whether orally or in writing, have an effect of enabling human beings to make better mental models of others, both for joint plans and for being members of a cooperating cultural community. [i]

Rumor mongering, a form of storytelling, as pernicious as it often it is, is an enormously effective way of thinking you know everything about everybody else’s business. It would also serve a cautionary function, alerting members of a clan who is to be trusted and who is to be believed with a grain of salt. For those seeking to climb the social ladder by destroying the reputation and the social capital of their rivals, it’s a handy lethal weapon. It’s interesting to note, we haven’t changed much in hundreds of thousands of years. Instead of whispering the latest gossip over the fence to our neighbor, today we barely know our neighbors, but we do have the virtual fence known as Facebook and Twitter available to broadcast our unedited thoughts and musings. Unfortunately, these vehicles allow us to whisper our vituperative lies into a seeming void without any immediate social feedback or disapproving look from a friend, but, as we have seen, if people dislike what we have said, the social price can be enormous. The blowback of rumor mongering has become nuclearized.

As we’ll learn latter, the evolution of stories served social groups as effective simulations and practice for action in the real world, allowing their members, especially the young ones lacking real world experience, to learn invaluable lessons without having to break their necks in the process. For those of you who grew up watching Wile E. Coyote attempting to outsmart Roadrunner on Saturday mornings, anvils could drop on coyote’s head, trap doors could plunge him thousands of feet to the bottom of a cavern, or dynamite could explode in his face, yet he’d return in the next scene to try it all over again. While Coyote seemed to never learn anything from his failed exploits, traditional tales filled with adverse consequences for silly and stupid behavior often proved to be effective means of getting children who are apt to jump and think afterwards to consider the potential penalties for dangerous pursuits and hopefully next time look before they leap.

From an evolutionary perspective, there’s a tangled web of simultaneous scaffolding seamlessly choreographed over eons of time when we consider the growth of the human brain, the development of sophisticated social structures, and our capacity to represent our experience and circumstances to others in the form of stories. This is not just an ancient story about our earliest ancestors, though. It is a tale still unfolding today as we duke it out on the political stage with competing narratives about how to best organize our society and economy, marshaling a host of “facts” and data to support alternate narrative futures. This is a war with story as the key weapon.

[i] Imagining Possible Worlds, Keith Oatley, Robin Dunbar and Felix Budleman, Review of General Psychology American Psychological Association 2018, Vol. 22, No. 2, 121–124 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000149