Tonight I taught the opening three hours of my very last Team Skills Workshop. Tomorrow, the main course of the team contract and communication skills. These workshops are not unlike the one I attended one snowy December day in Medford almost 20 years ago. That one wasn't offered by a college but by a for-profit business training organization. I liked the energy of the one day format and even at the time knew I'd one day be using it.
I forget when I created the one credit speech courses. I know it was donkey's years ago, probably while I still had a Mac on my desktop at work. I know I should probably have gone to H.R. today to look at my file but I was too busy focusing on finishing up the online interpersonal and prepping for this last edition of Team Skills.
I invented the one credit courses -- Team Skills, Conflict Management, Listening, and Emotional Intelligence -- back in the day when we were all supposed to be thinking about entrepreneurial education. Originally I thought about promoting and selling the courses outside of school but for various reasons (my own lack of actual entrepreneurial energy being one of them) the classes never actually "sold." They weren't even in the schedule until early in this century when my program leader Jon Bouknight said, "Let's put those one credit classes in the schedule." So we did!
When I first developed the classes I actually got one or two Oregon colleges to send me letters to say that they would accept the three classes as a replacement for interpersonal communication. But at the state level, that never flew, in spite of their original design to have some intellectual rigor as well as plenty of skill building.
So now, the way I teach Team Skills, it's all workshop with a paper at the end asking them to analyze either their own skills or those of a media team. (I enjoy reading papers about NCIS.) I don't even use a textbook anymore because the cheapest Crisp training manuals wind up over $20 at the school bookstore and it just wasn't worth having my students pay for that so I developed my own coursepack. I developed a public speaking coursepack years ago because the textbooks were just way too much information that few of the students read.
Tonight I tried a new activity. I have a picture in the coursepack of the seven universally recognized facial expressions. So I had them make these faces at each other in groups. Much laughter ensued. I told them that I had them making faces in part because it amused me and in part because I wanted them to realize that their faces were under their control and that they needed to use their face as they communicated with team members.
The workshops are fun, if exhausting. It will be a good day tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment