The Art of Focused Conversation for Schools, Third Edition
Over 100 Ways to Guide Clear Thinking and Promote Learning
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Debriefing a Major Trauma with Students or Staff
Situation
A traumatic incident has just happened in a high school. The immediate incident is over, but students and staff are shaken and need to talk about what has happened. Students go to their homerooms for a conversation, led by the homeroom teacher.
To talk about their personal experiences of the trauma. To face reality and begin to deal with it productively.
Experiential Aim
To move from shock to beginning to come to terms with the situation.
This event has shaken all of us. Let’s take a little time to reflect on what’s happened, so we can come to terms with it. I’m going to ask some questions that will help us gradually process what happened. I would like you to let everyone have their own answers — no interrupting, arguing, or judging what anyone says.
Objective Questions Imagine you were a video camera recording what you saw happening. What actions, words, phrases, objects, and scenes are recorded on your tape?
Let’s get everything out so we all have a full picture of what happened.
Reflective QuestionsWhat shocked you about this incident? What was most frightening?
What made you want to escape? How else did you find yourself reacting?
Any place you wanted to cheer?
Interpretive Questions
Why do you think this happened?
What might have been some other contributing factors?
What impact does it have on you?
How are you different now?
How might we be different a year from now?
What can we learn from this?
Decisional Questions
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
Who else do you need to see or talk with?
What can we do to help each other now?
What can we do to symbolize how we changed or what we have learned?
Closing
We will undoubtedly continue to reflect on this.
If you need help, please be sure to ask for it.
Hints Some of these questions are difficult to answer, so if there are few spoken answers, don’t worry. The very fact that of raising these questions and following this flow allows deeper reflection later. It may be helpful to print out the questions for the students to take with them for solitary, small group, or family reflection.
Formats
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About the Book
Why don’t kids learn? Why can’t students do higher order thinking? Why do educators have endless staff meetings with few results? How can parents and teachers communicate better?
The pressure upon educators to teach more, to a wider range and number of students, with decreasing resources and supports makes it urgent to find tools to answer such questions.
The Art of Focused Conversation for Schools demonstrates how the Focused Conversation method, widely used in organizations and businesses, can effectively be used in a K-12 educational setting. Each section deals with interactions among students, staff, and parents, and elaborates with over 100 sample conversations designed to make learning more meaningful, prevent and solve problems, and make communications in meetings more effective. Appendices showcase integrated curriculum examples where conversations have been used in unique combinations and list sample questions for each level of the conversation method. With a bibliography and index included, and patterned after its highly successful predecessor, The Art of Focused Conversation: 100 Ways to Access Group Wisdom in the Workplace, this book will be welcomed by parents, students, educators, and school administrators everywhere.
The Institute of Cultural Affairs has over 40 years experience in more than 32 nations. A unique facilitation, research and training organization, ICA Canada has provided participatory skills to many thousands of people worldwide.
About the Author
Jo Nelson has a BA in Education from the University of Iowa, and uses the Focused Conversation method to teach elementary school and train teachers across the world.
A professional facilitator, Jo holds the IAF Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) and the ICA ToP Certified Facilitator (CTF) designations. She works for ICA Associates Inc. in Toronto, Ontario.