April 30, 2010 Connecting IF Reports to Current Issues in Public Discussions A recent Frontline episode (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=bigimage&utm_source=bigimage_) exploring the vaccine controversy was fascinating and suggests several openings by which a couple of our less discussed reports might find some legs....
April 21, 2010 Exercising the Civic Muscle Colleague Jeff Prudhomme and I spent this last weekend in Cincinnati, Ohio at the Central States Communication Association Conference at the invitation of 2009 Summer Institute participant Professor Laura Black....
April 7, 2010 The Right Stuff The raucous debate last month (March, 2010) over the health care bill was hardly unexpected. For more than one hundred years, efforts to provide better access to decent health care...
March 5, 2010 Exploration, Development, and Debate One of the primary tasks of an IF facilitator is to ensure that his panels’ discussions keep to the task of exploring and developing possibilities, and do not degenerate into...
March 3, 2010 Practical Tips for Citizen Discussion of Possibilities: Part III-Managing and Wrapping Up a Discussion Two previous installments in this practical tips series have attempted to glean wisdom from the facilitators who have led dozens of discussions on IF reports. We have looked at some...
February 15, 2010 Practical Tips for Citizen Discussion of Possibilities: Part II- Starting the Discussion In my previous installment on practical tips I looked at recruitment of citizen groups. The who, what, and where of that first step of gathering the bodies exerts considerable influence...
January 30, 2010 Evaluation Rubrics (forms) for Student Facilitators and Group In case anyone is interested in using (or revising and using) either of the 2 evaluation forms that appear on pages 100-104 of the Guidebook for Student-Centered Classroom Discussions, I've...
October 23, 2009 An IF-less session this week…. My students re-grouped this week to work on the school presentation. They rallied into four teams according to their interests: rap song, a skid, a short video, activity to engage the target...
October 20, 2009 What Next? After reading Maria's recent post about what she will do next with her IF class now that they are not in their original groups, I realize that I feel I'm...