Essentially, a Lean Coffee is a group of people working together to learn … in an informal setting. It’s like a mini-unconference where the participants decide on the schedule.
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Step 1: Everybody writes down topics they’d like to discuss on stickies ….
Step 2: Each topic is briefly described …
Step 3: … votes …
Step 4: … stickies with the most votes at the top
Step 5: Each of these stickies are discussed
Step 6: If enough time … do another stickie
When you set an agenda, you control the conversation. …. When you control the agenda, you control the lessons learned. Since we enter a meeting with only our assumptions to guide us, agendas follow our assumptions. Our assumptions are based on what we already know. But what about the things we don’t know? Quite often, it’s the conversations we don’t plan on that give us the most insight. Why not instead run our meetings to learn or to discover?
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Conventional wisdom suggests that businesses hold far too many meetings attendees deem a waste of their time. …. To combat this, some call for meetings with rigid agendas.
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the discussion of a stated topic is a conversation. In fact, the entire reason we are calling the meeting is to have a conversation. ….
If we want to learn from our meetings, we need to allow the conversation to be set by the very professionals we invited to the meeting in the first place. …. Allowing the group to have a say in setting the agenda gives them buy-in for the importance of the topics.
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as the person who called the meeting, you can now direct the overall topic and even seed a few of the initial sticky notes. You can even set a few “must discuss” stickies at the top of the board and prioritize them the highest.
Notes:
Takeaways
either privately or f.ex a right-most column on the board
per topic or sharing takeaways in general at the end of the lean coffee
The time has come to stop quietly accepting the mistaken – yet popular – notion that education is primarly about getting jobs. The purpose of education is to make us better at using the collective knowledge of the human race in all areas of life. Yes, this includes our jobs, but it also includes raising our children, being informed citizens, managing our households, enjoying our leisure time, and just being good neighbors. Education should be to make us more effective at life. And as a powerful, new and poorly understood technology, computer education should be central to our learning experience
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*Everyone* needs to learn the fundamentals [of how to use computer technology], right in the core curriculum along with math, science, reading and history.
look it up right away, or just stop and let it go.
the
longer you try to come up with the word that’s on the tip of your
tongue, the more likely you’ll be to get stuck on that word in the
future. …. [this
has] implications for the classroom … “If the student can’t learn
something or can’t remember something… then you often see the teacher
encouraging them to work through it. ‘Just keep trying. It’ll come to
you.’
….
[but] Instead of trying to remember, students should look up the correct answer. ….
[and when you can’t look up right now?] For those situations, Humphreys’ advises that you “don’t keep trying. Just stop.”
….
So
remember, if you’re trying to help out somebody who’s stuck, you should
give them the answer. Humphreys also says you should “get them to
repeat it back to you. But don’t leave them in this state where they
just have to keep trying, because they’re just going to be digging
themselves into that error again.”
Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can’t be learned from reading a manual ….. There is some value in teaching kids skills they
can apply immediately, while they’re still in school, but there’s more value in teaching them deeper concepts that will benefit them forever, regardless
of changes in specific applications ….. [This will give] students insights that they’re unlikely to pick up on their own ….. People will
learn how to use features on their own, when they need them — and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It’s the conceptual things
that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.
Following are some general skills that I think we should teach in elementary
school.
