Friday, April 28, 2017

Seminar - Day 3

     The night before, the high school principal made schedule changes to our plan for the day - so my presentation time was moved to earlier in the day, and the room was changed.  

     I had been up late again - preparing the presentation - but I enjoyed the challenge.  I had to get my point across in 20 minutes.  I lost almost ten minutes with tech issues - mostly my fault for not getting there earlier.  

     The presentation went very well, I was very satisfied.  The topic was Accountable Talk - I started with a comic and the phrase “Are you listening?”, then I defined the word accountable, gave some synonyms, pictures, examples and non-examples.  I defined accountable talk, showed what it looked like, sounded like, how we do it, why we do it, who can do it, and how teachers can implement it.  I circled back the presentation to the phrase “are you listening?” with a tear-jerker video of a woman hearing for the first time.  A bit forced ending, but my point was to not take for granted this gift of listening, and to have empathy when we do.  

     I got tears out of my participants.

     Yes!


     However, I did have a big disappointment too.  Eight Turkish people had signed up for my session, only one showed.  A few peeked in, but didn’t come back.  Maybe some had been mixed about the location.  Maybe it was because my room was full and there were no chairs.  I don’t know - but I surely felt today my lack of relationship with my Turkish counterparts, and that was really disappointing.

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