Setting the community stage

After completing the readings for ISWO's unit 1 on community, I've had the chance to think about how these applied versus my practical experience, limited though it may be at this point.

The five critical features: rules, rounds, roles, rituals, and ringers were of interest to me as I hadn't fully had the opportunity to dissect and analyse the classes from afar.  In fairness, it's easy to be able to see what went right and what went wrong based on learner feedback, but it can be challenging to look at it from a cause-and-effect perspective.  It can also be difficult if the feedback is vague - "it was fine".  I am sensitive to the fact that I will be teaching classes that non-accountants will find boring; I am also aware that as a learner, the best professors I had took boring material and found a way to hold my interest in it.

Where I see the biggest opportunity in the material I teach is to approach it from two angles, both of which have to be championed by me.  The first is to really concentrate on the formative stage of the class.  The mistake I have made is in assuming that in teaching MBA's, they would come in "pre-programmed".  While this may be true to a certain degree, they have been programmed to someone else's learning preferences - teaching finance requires activating a different set of skills than teaching human resources or marketing.  Setting the stage with rules and roles would help address any ambiguity with the learners immediately.

The second angle for me ties in with the idea that what I teach is practical in the real world and there are a ton of examples of how it would be useful.  Understanding why BlackBerry is in trouble ties in with strategy and ends with finance; a movie like the inside job explains the correlation between debt and social policy; anything involving Enron involve accounting and the law.  The article that stuck out for me in the readings involved Facebook - I thought that one post solicited 60 written responses and 284 "likes"; the question isn't whether people wish to have their opinion heard, it's how to set the tone for them to want them to.

All I have to do is engage the right side of the brain to dream up a structure I find interesting and engaging while simultaneously drawing on the left to find the structure and discipline to put (and keep) it in place...