This is my fourth post inspired by the NZPF conference in Invercargill. The previous posts are; “Fifty Shades of Green‘, ‘Finding the Passion in Education‘, and ‘What do our Students Need?‘.
Todays post was inspired by Patti Dobrowolski, TedEx speaker and presenter extraordinarie (well, in my eyes). Patti led delegates through the Visual Goal Setting process. An impressive feat considering there were hundreds of school leaders in attendance for her keynote.
I was impressed and inspired within minutes of her starting. She had me at ‘every picture in your mind is a seed’. I could immediately see links to the work I was doing in my own setting, and started imagining how her process could be modified or incorporated into some of the things I, and my team, already do.
Some of you may recall I have a passion for Coaching. Recently I became an accredited Coach with Growth Coaching International. (yay me) As a ‘growth’ coach, I use questions to facilitate a coaching conversation around the GROWTH model to assist coachees to set goals and actions towards achieving their goals. Part of that process involves exploring ones current reality. Patti’s process has a Current Reality component (which automatically piqued my interest as you can imagine), and a Desired New Reality phase. As soon as I saw her template (see the slideshare) and worked through the process during the keynote, I knew there was going to be a place for this as a tool in my coaching tool kit.
Patti’s use of visuals makes sense. It struck a chord with me in how well it fits into the educational (or indeed life and business) coaching process, and I am looking forward to exploring the use of visuals in goal setting more. I am particularly interested in how this tool will assist in coaching students (and area I am currently inquiring into), and for when I am working with my teams, particularly leadership teams, to bring our share vision to life. I have also been wondering about how I might use this tool to support vision work with focus groups of parents and staff.
This is the first blog post based on Patti’s keynote – watch this space for post two on how to utilise the tool a bit more, inspired by working with various scenarios in her workshop.
As a part of my own e learning skill building, I have been playing around with different visual tools. Todays presentation is bought to you by fiddling around with slideshare!