[ instigate change ]

Hi! Sorry about the break in posting. This last week has been surprisingly busy. I don't know if you ever experience times where you're so busy that it's like you're standing still and the world is rushing by without being able to stop it. And no matter how hard you work you just can't seem to get an edge on it. That's how this last week has felt for me. Some of the busyness is good. Like I'm going to Jamaica - that's a good thing. But there were so many things to get done BEFORE I could depart for Jamaica and then I was facilitating sessions and working my exhibit booth on the day and day before I left. So I had to be packed on Tuesday to depart for the sunshine on Friday. No second chances on forgetting stuff. And the whole time I have just been telling myself - stay focused, stay on task. I needed to make sure the first thing on my mind was the workshops and having quality conversations with the teachers at the convention. I wasn't allowed to ...

Happy Thursday everyone!! I trust that this week has started well for everyone. I have fallen a little behind in the posts department. I still owe everyone the debrief from last week and I have a partially written post on Effective Teaching Practices in light of the workshops that I've been facilitating at teacher conventions. I was just at the Central Alberta Teacher Convention last week and I'm heading out to do the Palliser District next week in Calgary. Admittedly I always feel nervous leading up to the workshops because my brain starts playing tricks with itself. I find myself saying..."Who do you think you are? Teaching teachers? This is their business not yours...they know more than you! You won't teach them anything . They will hate your workshops." Yikes! It looks worse and yet, more ridiculous when you see it written down. But ultimately those are just the discouraging things that our world feeds us and that maybe I've been told ...

Today I'm writing about an experience from my big road trip in January when I was recruiting staff for my summer teams. Every year I spend about two or so weeks on the road travelling to Bible colleges in Alberta and Saskatchewan to recruit staff. Each college is different and how they create spaces for the dozens of camps to interact with students varies from one place to the next. I can't say that there's much of a formula that spells out success for recruiting staff but each College certainly brings their own flavour. I've mentioned this before but I find it very, very difficult to be facilitated. I don't think I was always as bad as I am now. Years ago, my task-driven nature allowed me to fully invest in whatever challenge or activity was presented. Now I find that I intentionally step back to allow someone else to “have the experience” when that really goes against everything that we teach in team building. In a way, it's like I'm denying my team the ...

 ...Google Friends Connect, that is. I feel as though this is a giant scandal of sorts...but it really isn't. If you're an avid blog follower (admittedly I definitely am) then you probably are "following" a number of blogs through Google Friends. I've had my head under the sand apparently because it was all news to me this last week when several of the blogs that I follow started talking about Google changing everything including the “Followers” widget that appears in the sidebar. This isn't a life-ending thing for me because most of you who read/follow my blog haven't used it (shame on you)...even though I can see where you're coming from (check the clustrmap!). All this to say that some time around the beginning of March – Google will shut down Google Followers. So...I'm jumping on the “Linky Followers” band wagon. It's super easy and like most things – it's FREE! The nice thing that I actually found when I signed...

I hope that everybody has had a chance to maybe go over this with a couple friends and that the explanation made sense. Once you start working through it - everything becomes quite clear. I first experienced this activity with a management team from work. We went to a day long cooperate team building session. I struggled to get much out of it beyond this activity. I think what I learned that day was that cooperate team building is a very different beast than team building with youth. Youth have a greater ability to change and adjust to their situations - which sounds a little backwards because you'd think that as adults who have developed faculties and a greater vision for their environments would be able to make the changes necessary to be more efficient and more successful. When I look at my own experiences working in and with adult teams - this is not the typical case. We're more set in our ways of doing things and we really, really don't like to be told we're wro...