ESP Lambda Chapter Professional Development

November 8, 2019Celeste Carmichael No Comments

Tips for Increasing Impact with Tabling Events

Fun Fact: CCE program reporting data indicates that Extension staff reach more indirects via “tabling” at events than other means of indirect education

Tabling is an effective way to educate and engage potential audiences. I’m reviewing data right now and can see…we use tabling a lot, reaching potentially millions each year. While hard to evaluate the impact of such events, there are notable ways of making tabling activities more engaging for all (and fun for staff!). A little googling on “driving traffic to exhibitors” will give you a sense of how to grow your audience in this way. Below is a synopsis of ideas that you may find. What other ideas do you have to share? Let us know @cceorgdev

Have Fun. When you are tabling, be enthusiastic and friendly. Be active in your outreach. Stand in front of your table and engage with passersby—don’t wait for people.
Choose a location. Where you table matters. If possible – pick the area where your audience is most likely to be – ask for an area with lots of foot traffic.
Recruit Volunteers. Effective tabling typically requires several people – at least two per shift…so that they will feel fresh and able to have more fun with the audience.
Promote. While your table will likely attract those already walking by, promoting in advance will help to draw additional visitors and supporters. Social media posts before or during can help. A study by Deloitte and Touche found that pre-show promotions can improve the quality of the audience attracted to exhibitors booths by 46%. You may also want to e-mail those you know will be there and ask them to stop by as a booth with people stopping by will look more appealing to new audiences too.
Gather Materials. Think about what will attract people to your table and what visitors are likely to pick up once you have their attention. Pay attention to what people are looking at the next time you are in a venue with booths… Freebies & drawings are known methods for getting people to come closer for potential engagement. A drawing can be a lower budget way to pull people in for a conversation starter. A 2004 Georgia Southern University study found that coupling an invitation with the promise of a gift is more effective at driving traffic to exhibitor booths than an invitation without a freebie or discount.
Stay in Touch. Consider having a computer with a Google Form, a spreadsheet, or a sign-up sheet with pens to record the names and email addresses of interested students.
Include a Call to Action or an Action. Offer specific ways that your audience can be involved – an activity, photo booth, survey…citizen science…anything active.

April 5, 2019Celeste Carmichael

Dare to Lead

Many are familiar with Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability and authenticity. New York State 4-H Educators have been gobbling this up for the last year or two and sharing it with others via webinars and conference workshops. In Dare to Lead Brown takes us into our workplaces. This book helps us to be vulnerable at work and to lean into communication with our teams. Sometimes this communication can be receiving feedback that is challenging to hear. This work reminds us of the importance of challenging interactions and the growth that can happen if we open ourselves up to allow it. One piece I took away from the book is that clear is kind and unclear is unkind. If we are giving someone directions or feedback, we need to be as clear as possible. Sometimes it is difficult to give information in an honest, open, and direct way because we do not want to hurt people’s feeling or insult them. However, we are doing a disservice when we do not dig deep and share the truth as clearly as possible.

For those interested in aiming for behavioral change, there is a self-assessment. It visits the areas of Rumbling with Vulnerability, Living into Our Values, Braving Trust, and Learning to Rise. It would be a good tool to take as a pre and later as a post.

Susan Coyle is a 4-H Educator in Monroe County, and recipient of the 2018 ESP professional development scholarship.

April 5, 2019Celeste Carmichael

Discovering Your True North

I read Discovering Your True North, by Bill George, for a graduate course, High Performance Management. I am sure I would not have picked the book up off a shelf at the library and thought to read it on my free time. However, I really enjoyed the book and the information in it. Bill George is a former CEO of a large medical device company. While his frame for his workplace is much different than a Cooperative Extension Association, I found his writing relatable. I particularly appreciated the way that George keeps values at the center of work as well as his encouragement of mindfulness and affinity groups. The True North in the title is your values. He encourages discovering and understanding what your true north is and really sticking to honoring it in decisions and actions. It was also a great reminder that I need to continue to work on mindfulness and work-life balance. Lastly, he spoke of the importance of having a few trusted people that you can confide in.

This book comes with an online self-evaluation tool. It is recommended to take the assessment more than once as you journey to becoming an authentic leader. It cover five core areas and reflect if you are having success with change through self-awareness.

Susan Coyle is a 4-H Educator in Monroe County, and recipient of the 2018 ESP professional development scholarship.

April 4, 2019Celeste Carmichael

Bite-sized Learning

Designing instruction and being a learner in an audience or class, working to learn new things, are flip sides of the same coin. Learning is the intended outcome – but achieving that goal can be tricky.

Were you ever a student or a participant in a class or a training (online or otherwise) that left you feeling too “full”, or confused? Or perhaps it left you reviewing the lesson 2, 3 or 4 times so that you could better understand what was presented? That feeling, referred to as cognitive overload, is real – your brain just can’t handle that much information.

Our job as educators in Extension is often to take complex ideas or research and translate it into information that anyone can understand…yet it is easy to get caught up in academic jargon or the details, leaving our learners frustrated or the learning outcome unmet.

multimedia = words + pictures (a strategy for promoting transfer of knowledge).

Research indicates that using words and pictures together is an important strategy for providing instruction that promotes deep learning and a transfer of knowledge. Drs. Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer, in their book e-Learning and the science of instruction, describe e-learning multimedia as a combination of text and audio as well as still and motion visuals to communicate content.

These ideas, which may seem like just good common sense, are also grounded in science and research. They go on to describe a list of multimedia principles that are intended to help avoid cognitive overload and help learners more easily grasp complex issues. I’m going to be writing about those principles on our ESP blog and will feature the segmenting principle in this post.

The segmenting principle suggests that breaking a complex lesson down from one large lesson into smaller, more manageable segments can help a learner to more easily understand a lesson. Breaking a big idea down into smaller buckets of content is much like what we would do if we were preparing a course, module or presentation outline.

Clark and Mayer also suggest presenting the ideas one at a time, with a mental break in between to allow for the learner to digest the concept. More time with one concept equates to time for pushing ideas around in your working memory, giving you a chance to relate the concept to prior knowledge.

Idea + Pause + Idea + Pause = Greater Cognition and Retention

Can you think of a time when you have participated in an training or lesson set up this way?

More for those of us developing online learning experiences:

Learner-controlled start and stop: In a study by Schar and Zimmermann (2007) two groups were compared: one watching a continuous animation and another watching an animation which included controls to pause the screen. Both experimental groups proved to have no difference in learning. However, the researcher team suggested that when the animation didn’t have pre-chosen points to stop, the learner didn’t know to make the decision to stop. To be more successful, the lesson designer might be more intentional, inserting auto-pauses at points that make logical sense.
Learner-controlled learning: In another study, Mayer, Mathias, and Wetzell (2002) presented some learners with a labeled diagram while others were presented with an interactive diagram where if click on the different part, a short summary was read. The students who used the narrated segmented training did better on their performance tests than those who did not.

Worth the effort? Why invest the time to carry out the segmenting principle? Poorly designed instruction wastes time and money. We want to help participants understand what they are being taught, learn new skills and grow in confidence. Research shows that the segmenting principle is a successful method to design instruction of complex issues.

Reflecting on the segmenting principle: How will you use these ideas to plan your next educational program?

April 1, 2019Celeste Carmichael

Working Out Loud helps create new habits, form new working practices

This winter I read through Working Out Loud, by John Stepper. Working Out Loud is a book about helping to set and reach (personal and work) goals. I was introduced to the concepts in grad school and have been talking about it for a couple of years. I enjoyed reading it and sharing the ideas with others at work this year. The book encourages the reader to set an intention and then provides a process to work towards it.

An intention I’ve set for myself for this year is to get up at 5am each morning – so that I don’t feel so rushed to get out the door, but can slowly own the day. For me this is not easy – so following some of the Working Out Loud ideas for developing new habits has been helpful.

The book suggests reading what others write about the habit that you are trying to adopt, talk to people around you about what you are learning, call attention to not just what you are learning, but to those that you are learning from, and continuing the process. The idea of working out loud is critical to an outcome that my work unit (organizational development) values – building collegial mentoring relationships. As a result – we built the book into the working practice of the Program Development Leadership Cohort we created small groups to help staff to not just learn about working out loud, to actually do it. Cohort members seem appreciative of the process and the opportunity to share what they are learning.

In conclusion, this one gets two thumbs way up – a great read and a practice for success.

March 19, 2019Celeste Carmichael

Welcome to our Lambda Chapter blog!

Epsilon Sigma Phi (ESP) is dedicated to fostering standards of excellence in the Extension System and developing the Extension profession and professional. This Lambda Chapter blog will allow our staff from across the state to share news, resources and professional development content with each other. We hope this becomes a portal where chapter members can keep in touch and learn.