Group Goal Setting for Stellar Sessions
How wranglers can make their sessions memorable
MozFest is almost here! There’s so much to see! So many sessions! So many full brains! How on earth can wranglers and facilitators make sure that their content is useful to the people in their sessions, and that their participants feel like they have agency over their MozFest experience?
The team from P2PU and Chicago Public Library, who are running the Online Learning Done Face 2 Face pathway have an idea that we’ll be using this year: setting public goals for every session, a method we’ve used to great success in our Learning Circles project at CPL.
Online Learning offers great potential to reach non-traditional learners, who need it most. However, the lack of a supportive community of practice around online learning experiences means that many learners drop out of MOOCs and are discouraged from undertaking any more online learning courses. P2PU and CPL developed Learning Circles, a methodology for building face-to-face communities around online learning, which aim to empower learners to take charge of their learning within supportive communities of their peers.
Goal setting and sharing is a powerful tool to help groups craft their group identity, increase motivation, and build confidence. By setting goals early, group members will be able to refer to these on a weekly basis to track their progress over time. In a typical Circle, learners take time to write down one or two major learning goals for themselves for the Learning Circle, prompted by the question: “What do you want to know or be able to do by the end of this course?”
We’ve found that the most effective goals are ones that are specific, difficult, but also achievable within the time given for the Circle, and have clear checkpoints that you can make progress towards each week. Good facilitators will be able to help learners improve their goals by making them more specific, at a reasonable level of difficulty, and with clear checkpoints. We then invite each individual to write down their goals and checkpoints somewhere, so that they can refer back to them over time.
We’re hoping to use this same methodology for the Online Learning Done Face 2 Face pathway during MozFest, and will invite all participants in our sessions to set goals and checkpoints, and share them publicly at the start of the session. They will be our blueprint, and help facilitators ensure that we deliver sessions that are useful and valuable to participants, and that we all stay on track and work together.
