Adam Nathanson

Though I announced in class last Monday that I was prepared to “cut off” data collection, fearing it could go on forever, I received a phone call Thursday that altered my plans.  One of the teachers I interviewed told me that she’d be meeting with two students who fit the profile of best possible outliers, and that they’d expressed their willingness to respond to my questions.  This particular intermediate client really takes ownership of the problem and the solution!  So on Tuesday I’ll meet them at the Adult Education Center and find out about their experiences as model achievers who’ve followed a successful trajectory through ESL into ABE/GED, resulting in diplomas.  This will definitely lend a component of appreciative inquiry, discovering what works – to my process consultation,  Like Schein notes, PC does not always occur in a linear fashion; I’m ‘going with the flow.’  In the meantime, I have specific learners to follow and focus on in the NRS and SSWS databases, rather than being overwhelmed by the hundreds of learners who have passed through five different classes/instructors over the last several years.

That Block’s body of work finds utility with international non-profit organizations, and that his focus encompasses more than just the corporate realm, is a welcome discovery.  Follow this link to a Huffington Post article on the value of neighborhoods to see what I’m referring to.  Last week I found out that Block consulted with the World Bank and others which I can’t locate tonight since it appears that the sister site to flawlessconsulting.com, designedlearning.com, is down.  Non-corporate Human Services-oriented graduate students should note this.  Block sells himself short by not sharing the breadth of his experience in order to engender buy-in from the non-HRD track students.

A recent, decidedly un-corporate (?) work by Block

right click and rename

Here I go again, griping about Block’s word choices.  It seems the author wants to create his own unique vocabulary without any particular stated purpose.  This contradicts the pretense in Flawless Consulting to conduct the recommended interactions  with clients in plain, simple, and even street (?!) language (page 82).  Why does he rename the easily grasped concepts of “wants” and “needs” as “essential wants” and “desirable wants” in Chapter 5, The Contracting Meeting?  If something is essential to moving forward with process consultation, it is a necessity, otherwise known as a need.  So to recap:

• Desirable want = want, Essential want = need

• Support staff = consultant

• Line manager = manager

Can't contact, primary, and ultimate clients be one and the same in community groups?

o As I went through the “Who Is the Client?” activity, I kept reflecting on the ebb and flow of the contact, primary and ultimate client categories.  They seem to flip flop depending on the juncture at which the project stands, much as the consultant’s role alternates between expert, pair of hands and process consultant from moment to moment.  If contact and primary clients are authentically members of a community or organization on whose behalf the project takes place, then can’t they too be considered ultimate clients?

Schein seems to be a precise master of his realm, with his exact word choices and cautionary examples of dialogue that sparks resentment or other negative reactions in clients. I really need to reflect on the “don’ts” of process consultation listed on page 33. I know I’ve used every one of the lines listed in various workplace and educational scenarios! Examples of better, alternate consultant reactions would help me to correct this problem that I never knew I had until I hit chapter 2.    The images in this post show some of the environments in which I made my then-unknowing process consultation blunders.  Perhaps the group can weigh in on this Monday night?

 Applying Schein to Adult Literacy

 Happily, Schein’s Process Consultation Revisited (1999) intersects with and compliments    well educator/organizer Myles Horton’s important liberatory philosophy of Adult Learning which undergirds my approach to the field.  Consider the following comparison for similarities:

Schein states on page 20 that “Process Consultation is the creation of a relationship with the client that permits the client to percieve, understand, and act on the process events that occur in the client’s internal and external environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client.”

Horton’s philosophy is summarized by Thayer-Bacon (2004) as follows:

Horton strongly believed that people learn to make decisions by doing it, that people have the capacity to govern themselves but they need to exercise that capacity. He wanted the staff to let the people run the school so they could learn how to make their own decisions and develop leadership skills. He believed the teacher’s role is one of helping empower students to think and act for themselves.

During the Fall 2010 semester, I had the opportunity to reflect on how I could improve my approaches to design, development, and delivery of the English as a Second Language (ESL) adult literacy program at Henrico Jails.  The three assigned texts, as well as the project-based learning orientation of the class contributed significantly to recalibration of the curriculum I want to present as an ever-developing practitioner.  Yet, as could be expected, concerns linger about its effectiveness in the most challenging areas.

As the class began, and we studied and discussed Patricia Cranton’s Planning Instruction for Adult Learners, many of the author’s points reinforced my current practices in the classroom, as well as validating my experience.  Cranton’s treatment of the tension between instructional design and the true contextual, affective, constructivist nature of adult learning in Chapter 1 certainly rang true for me.  A revelation appeared to me in Chapter 2, when, writing about different learning styles, she offers that “it may be detrimental simply to identify a person as having a certain style or preference.  That individual may use the label we [instructors] assign as a justification for persisting with an ineffective learning strategy.” (p.48)  I often observe this phenomenon first-hand among ESL learners who place great cultural value on positivist teacher lecture classroom paradigms.  They may even feel like they are not receiving quality instruction if the instructor does not satiate their desire to play the role of recipients of what Paulo Freire terms the “banking method” of education.  Many Adult Basic Education learners too, appeal to the instructor to identify them as empty vessels so that they may follow the more familiar, comfortable, yet unsuccessful pathways of their past brushes with the educational system.  I have seen instructors’ insistence on constructivist methods even result in attrition and retention issues in such cases.  Yet Cranton correctly maintains that it is incumbent on the practitioner to foster students’ “capacity to engage in learning in a variety of ways.” (p.48)  I consciously designed my Jail Talk program plan to avoid allowing learners to slip into the aforementioned patterns by employing the four ESL skills of listening, reading, writing and speaking; in both the student activities and evaluations.

Rosemary Cafarella’s Planning Programs for Adult Learners presented me with another component of adult learning with which to grapple – differences between program and instructional objectives.  As I paged back through my broken-spined copy, I found Exercise 8.1’s chart on page 165 littered with erasures, arrows and crossed out attempts to write objectives.  It serves as a record of my struggle with the learning process, jarring my memory of how just a few months earlier, I misidentified them as one and the same.  Honestly, even now, my grasp on their differences remains tenuous, ready to atrophy the moment after they fall into disuse.  Obviously, the two types of objectives are integrally related, and because I come face to face with learners in varied direct instruction environments on a daily basis, I automatically subordinate program objectives to learning ones.  However, in my unique position as both principal and teacher at our little jailhouse schools, I must continue to find the discipline to make distinction between them.  My program plan gave me pause to examine the ways in which, contrary to my previous line of thinking, strong, relevant instructional objectives support, and are actually subordinate to, program objectives.  Where initially I placed greater importance on the goal of individual learners’ discrete improvements in ability to respond to deputies or medical staff, I now see how such an objective fits into the superstructure of the program objective of improving communication between ESL inmates and the sheriff’s department.

Russ-Eft and Preskill’s Evaluation in Organizations provided thoughtful, cautionary insight on assessing the effectiveness of my program plan.  Frankly, I know that their chapter on observations addresses issues that I still have not thoroughly resolved.  Will the length and number of my observations of learners interacting with staff represent a sufficient demonstration of their (hopefully) newly developed communicative skills?  Will the observational checklist that I designed and included in Jail Talk withstand field testing?   Will my observations maintain enough objectivity to counteract the threat to validity stemming from my potential “evaluator’s bias [?]” (p.261)  Clearly, I have a stake in the program’s success.

Through class discussions and readings of all three books, I began to differentiate between knowledge acquisition and transfer of learning, which I similarly believed to be the same at the beginning of the course.  My entire program plan really hinges on transfer of learning to realize success with two stakeholder groups: inmates and deputies.  Without it, communication will not improve.  Still, for the third stakeholder, Henrico Schools Adult Education, my new initiative could reasonably contribute to learners’ gains on CASAS standardized reading and listening tests even without the application of the knowledge to any real-life scenarios.  A student might feasibly leave class after two and a half hours and instruction and successful post-testing, only to freeze, dumbfounded, when the deputy says, “What dayroom are you in?  Let me see your ID.”

I am so glad that we were all able to develop our Instructional Design projects as relevant tools for our professional and academic pursuits, same goes for the Teaching Philosophy statement.  To confirm my hopes from my first post about this class, meeting Adult Learning people from the Medical and Dental wings of VCU was one of the best things about the class, because the experience broadens my perspective on our field.  Adult Learning truly is wide open for those who show motivation.  Of course, though they are totally different, it was nice to once again be in class with Sarah and Ali from the Adult Literacy cohort. 

I look forward to pulling together all the disparate elements of my instructional project within Vella’s frameworks.  Her learner-centered, constructivist approach will moderate well the GED Content Standards-based objectives in my lesson plans.  Though the day-long workshop appears to be the more attractive option/format from what I’ve seen submitted so far, I plan to present four separate but related two hour long class lessons in GED Math.  As a body of work, they will comprise a (hopefully harmonious) unit of instruction.  As Professor Wendy has recommended, my intent is to create lesson plans that can be used at my job(s) by my coworkers and I.  Our administrators require us to contribute to “lesson plan banks” which all the teachers may drawn upon.  My concern is that at this late stage I’m vacillating about switching the whole thing over to ESL, since it would most directly benefit me in my work in the moment.  I just started doing ESL direct instruction in corrections, as well as my ongoing teaching of English Literacy Civics class at a community satellite site.  I’d better get focused quick!  Do I even have the option of changing so dramatically from my pre-approved theme?