Hypocritical post
Well, after ranting last time about how attached I’ve become to really considering goals before planning my conflict workshops, this week I have a different bent on things.
I’ve been finishing up my program plan (due on Friday, ack!) and I’ve also been fine tuning a presentation for tomorrow, and one thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes, I can’t seem to pinpoint the objectives or goals until I’ve started planning. Let me try to explain better. First of all, with most of my groups, there haven’t been any strict goals that the clients wanted me to address. That’s what was bugging me before- this whole idea that I am supposed to design a workshop for a group who can’t tell me (or won’t) what they want to learn.
This week, I’m going a little further than that. Once I have this group, and they don’t have a specific request of what I should present to them, I still have to create a plan. And when I do, I have tried starting with the objectives (the “what” of Jane Vella), and then moving to the learning tasks (the “How”…). The problem is, I don’t get very far this way, and I waste a lot of time trying to decide on objectives.
What I want to know is, is it bad if I write out a general idea of what I’d like to do in a workshop, and THEN pull out the objectives that I see that workshop encompassing? I find that it is MUCH easier to then go back and notice where things aren’t aligned or are meeting too many goals (and thus not really focusing on any overarching theme or goal), and then I can tweek and change it. Ultimately, I get to the same preferred result: a workshop that is purposeful and one where the various tasks and activities align towards a common set of goals. It’s just that I can’t seem to start with those goals. I
An example of this is that I am working on a presentation for a week or so from now, and I am partnering with a woman who is a consultant. We were individually working on ideas and agreed we would meet last week to compare notes. I had asked her about our goals for the workshop, and she had admitted that we did not know what the group’s goals were. We agreed that we’d try to create our own so that the presentation at least made sense to us and to the participants. When I sat down to write them out, I found that it was much easier to do the “bad” way of program planning and just write out a tentative schedule of activities, discussions, etc., and then work backwards, looking at what each activity was really bringing to the table, how the segments tie together, what the participants would leave with if I left it as it was. From there, I was able to pretty quickly rearrange and refine. I even worked backwards to make sure I had each of Jane Vella’s “I” activities in there!
Does anyone else work this way? Is there a danger in this that I’m missing, other than if I’m not diligent enough, I might miss something? If I had to change, is there a technique someone uses to help get through that tricky goal defining stage? I know that there are worksheets and such in my texts, but I think I find it a bit tedious to do it that way. Does someone know a more fun way to brainstorm those goals?
I will say though that IF my clients had given me their own expectations and/or goals, then I might not have had to use a backwards approach. Or maybe I still would have. Hmm…
