Reflections and Proposals

For all the participants in our recent Summer Institute, I hope you find yourself settling back into your lives–and discovering new ideas and insights as these percolate up from the last week or so. After an intensive endeavor like the Summer Institute, it’s often a good idea to give yourself some space to reflect upon the experience. As I mentioned at our closing, when you submit a course proposal, we’d like you to send us some of your thoughts about the Summer Institute as organized around 3 basic prompts or questions.  Pete has posted the guidance for writing up your course proposals. Below are the 3 prompts for capturing your reflections on the Summer Institute. Remember, we’re not interested in long or formal treatises on these topics. A paragraph or two on each would be fine.  Please submit these reflections with your course proposal via email to Pete by 8-31-09.

• The Most Challenging Aspect of the IF Discussion Process?

As you think back over your experience of the IF discussion process, or as you think about using this process in your classroom, what seems the most challenging for you? This might be the thing you feel is hardest for you to learn, or the aspect of the discussion process you’re struggling with the most. It could be the aspect of the discussion process or facilitation that you’d most like to focus on or to improve. This can be something you’re actively trying to figure out–not necessarily something you’ve resolved in your mind. We’ve found that it’s helpful to share challenges or things we’re struggling with–even if we don’t know what the resolution might be.

• A Key Lesson Learned?

As you think back over your experience of the IF discussion process, or as you think about using this process in your classroom, what’s a key lesson you feel you learned from the Summer Institute? This might be an insight you had during the Summer Institute, perhaps in your discussions with a colleague, or it might be something that has become clear to you now that you’re back at home.  You might reflect upon an important developmental moment for you, and the insight(s) you have drawn from this.

• What Would You Tell A Colleague?

Suppose a colleague was wondering about participating in a future IF Summer Institute, then you might tell them, “Well, if you’re interested in X, then this might be for you.”  This is a chance to explore and describe that X. You might think if  this as a way of another way of describing the take-away from the whole experience or the kind of benefit someone might get. You might think about the kind of person who’d be interested in this sort of thing and the kind of challenges and opportunities that person might find in this experience.

–Jeff Prudhomme

Talent is Liquified Trouble

In his 2005 documentary entitled Sketches of Frank Gehry the filmmaker Sydney Pollock commented that one of his own mentors told him that “talent is liquefied trouble.”  Pollock mentions this in part to convey that there was some struggle that Gehry couldn’t contain, a kind of upsurge that had to come out in his work.  He was also trying to convey that there is a level of friction inherent in all creative work–and that some of this was internal for Gehry and some inter-personal.

I’ve been thinking about Pollack’s phrase in terms of the kind of struggle that people often go through when they engage collaboratively in open and exploratory discussions, such as with the Interactivity Foundation’s approach to “sanctuary discussions.”  I don’t mean to claim that you have to be an especially  “talented” or uniquely “creative” individual to take part in the discussion process. I’m thinking of this more in terms of what it suggests about the experience of thinking creatively or innovatively.  There are times when participants in sanctuary-style discussions really struggle, when they feel troubled and express frustrations. In fact, it’s hard to imagine really engaging in this sort of open exploration and not feeling troubled and frustrated at some point.  As I mentioned at the recent Summer Institute, I think that this can be a good sign—a sign that creative thinking is going on. It can be a sign that the discussion participants are moving in directions where there is no pre-established pathway.  It could be a sign of opening up new possibilities or of creating something new.

If you’re thinking of using this approach in the classroom, it may help to alert students to this aspect of the experience. It might help them recognize that a certain amount of frustration, friction, or being “troubled,” is not only natural but also a good sign.  This won’t give them any easy answers, but it may help them deal with their struggles along the way and to see them in a more positive light.

–Jeff Prudhomme

Lauren’s Story

The entry below is another story from my colleague Jack Byrd about student experiences with a student-centered discussion class. It might help you think about the ways that discussion facilitation differs from making an oral presentation. You might also think about the ways that this could help students who don’t normally excel in a typical solo oral presentation.

–Jeff Prudhomme

Lauren is a bright student who suffers from panic attacks. She has struggled with depression and has seen a counselor for both her depression and panic attacks.  In classes where her grades depend on written work, she does very well.  But in courses where she needs to do an oral presentation, her anxieties get in the way of her performance.  She hasn’t done well on such presentations.

Lauren wants a career in health care management and realizes she has got to learn how to lead groups and make presentations in front of a group.  She wants this career strongly enough that she is willing to enroll in a team-based discussion course. She knows it will be a struggle for her.

She is the only female on her team (there are few women in the class).  Since Lauren is the most organized student in the team, the team has looked to her for a lot of team management activities.  When Lauren is asked to facilitate, she has done this as an extension of her innate organization skills. She has come to see facilitation as essentially an organizational task.  As a result, Lauren doesn’t experience the same anxiety of being in front of a group as she did when making a solo presentation. The facilitation experience has given her the confidence that she can be effective communicating to and with a group.  After just two experiences at facilitating, she has overcome the panic and anxiety that have bothered her for years.

Lauren has become an excellent facilitator in part because she is sensitive to the challenges that her teammates may be having in the discussion.  Her style is one of quiet confidence.  She asks questions of others without interjecting her own opinions.  The unique skill that Lauren brings to facilitation is her organizational approach.

Some lessons learned:

• Discussion facilitation is a different communication skill from making a typical oral presentation. It has a lower level of personal risk and tends to generate less anxiety. As a result students might find facilitation experiences to be a vehicle for developing confidence in front of a group.
• When students incorporate their personal strengths (e.g. organizational skills, creativity) into their facilitation approach, the anxiety of facilitation tends to dissolve. You might encourage students to build on their particular strengths to shape their approach to successful facilitation.
• Solo presentations can be easy for extroverted students who naturally have the gift of gab–and a terrifying challenge for the student who is shy by nature. Shy or quiet students, students who are good listeners, can, however, end up being superb discussion facilitators.

–Jack Byrd

Trying Out Citizen Discussions

There are 3 focal areas for our activities in the Summer Institute: 1) learning the discussion process, 2) connecting this process to the classroom, and 3) connecting this process to discussions beyond the classroom walls in “citizen discussions.” In this entry I’ll talk more about our “Small Group Citizen Discussions,” the 3rd and final focal area for the Summer Institute.

All of our discussions are “citizen discussions” in some broad sense. We tend to use this designation as a short-hand way to indicate the small-scale discussions we have with a small group of people after a Sanctuary Project is completed (to reorient yourself to what we do, you might look back at this entry). Our Sanctuary Projects engage small groups of citizens in sustained discussions on a particular topic for a year or so. These culminate in a “citizen discussion report” that describes 4 or more (often more like 7) policy possibilities, broad approaches our society might take to deal with some aspect of the area of concern. We then use that report to stimulate exploratory discussions by a new small group of citizens. You might think of this as expanding ripples in a pond: we’d like to set these ideas in motion to see what others think about them and to see what new ideas might be discovered in the process. We’re not trying to sell anyone on these ideas and reach consensus. We want to enable new discoveries and open up discussion, not shut it down or narrow it.

At the close of the Summer Institute we’ll have a demonstration discussion to show you what these Small Group Citizen Discussion are like. We’ll teach you how to facilitate these in your own communities. In terms of topics, we have citizen discussion reports exploring public policies for: Genetic Technologies, Depression, Privacy, Science, Rewarding Work, Property, Regulation, and Civic Discourse. This fall we plan to add one on Retirement Security. Within a year we’ll have reports on The Future of Civil Rights, Democracy Promotion, Global Security, and Shaping Where We Live. Who knows, we may even be able to shape a report out of your Summer Institute discussions on Intellectual Property!

There are a number of reasons we’d like to involve you in this. Here are a couple of broad points. First, we think it can be a really powerful way to make connections between your academic life and the life of the surrounding community. You may find there are ways to involve some of your students in these discussions, further expanding the interactivity between your classroom and the community. You might also find it to be empowering to have reflective discussions with other adults outside of an academic context.  Second, we think its a valuable way to enhance your interactivity with us. By conducting citizen discussions on one or more of our projects, you’ll get a better sense of what we’re up to. You’ll gain a better sense of the kind of thinking that goes on in our projects. This in turn might open up some possibilities for expanding collaboration with us. There might even be a time when you’d like to conduct a project of your own with support from us (say, during a sabbatical).

Part of the thrust of our Summer Institute is fostering a community of fellow thinkers who are interested in the kind of work we’re doing. So involving you in our Small Group Citizen Discussions is way to involve you more fully in what we do, so we can learn with and from you. As an organization, we’re always interested in collaboratively exploring and developing possibilities to do what we do. We’re interested in working together to generate new insights and new possibilities. Remember, we’re interested in the approach of creative agreement. We’re interested in saying “yes–and.” We’re interested in developing conversation partners who can respond, “yes–and.”

–Jeff Prudhomme

Diversifying Social Skills, Ryan’s Story

Here’s another story about student experiences with discussion facilitation from my colleague Jack Byrd (you can find his first entry on developing social confidence here). This story focuses on some of the ways students might expand their social skills by participating in a student-centered discussion course.

–Jeff Prudhomme

One of the things that often happens in a student-centered discussion course is that students will diversify their social skills.  Many students start such a class with a set of social skills that work fine in a fairly narrow peer group.  When students participate in a discussion course, they begin to develop social skills that are suitable for a more diverse society.  Consider the case of Ryan.

To be blunt, Ryan has been a horrible student so far. His attendance has been spotty and he rarely does homework. He has been on academic suspension once already and will be suspended permanently if he doesn’t improve.  Recently he enrolled in a facilitation course where students are assigned to discussion groups.  Students are taught to be facilitators and are asked to facilitate their group discussion on a rotating basis.  Since it is a performance class, attendance is mandatory. Both the individual student and members of the discussion team are penalized for missed classes by any team member.

At first Ryan didn’t fit in with his group.  He comes from an urban area while the others come from rural communities. He is full of bluster while the  others tend to be shy.  Ryan is really into sports, while the others don’t really don’t follow sports at all.  His group is a mix of low-performing and high-performing students.

Ryan’s role in the group has been fascinating to observe. Almost right away he found out that his typical bluster wouldn’t work. The other students wouldn’t engage him when he was trying to bluster his way through. His group developed some strict cooperative behavior guidelines.  This was a big change for Ryan. He now had a group for which he was responsible when it came to attendance and homework.

Once Ryan understood and embraced the rules of the group, his performance changed.  One thing that helped him make this change was to see how his group functioned like a sports team. He’d taken part in team sports before, and he understood and valued the idea of not letting down his teammates. Pretty soon, the others started to look upon him as a team leader, like a team captain. Never before in college had he felt that his contribution was that important.

Ryan has now become a major contributor in the class.  He is an excellent facilitator.  He has become respectful of all his classmates.  This is especially striking because at the start of the class it was clear he had social prejudices that were common in the urban neighborhood where he grew up.  Ryan has also helped his group develop a harder edge.  The other group members were initially too polite with each other.  Ryan never held back on his strongly held beliefs, even when these were often contrary to the majority. He has helped his teammates learn to express what they really believe rather then holding back on ideas that might not fit the mainstream.

Some lessons learned:

• When students are in the same discussion group throughout the semester, they develop a sense of responsibility for others in their group. This sense of responsibility can improve a student’s own academic performance.
• Blending cultures in a group can be very effective in building up a broader range of social and communication skills among the group members.
• Groups can function as sports teams.  For some students, this can be a valuable frame of reference for working within the group.

–Jack Byrd

Summer Institute Activities: Educational Connections

So, what kinds of things will we be doing at the Summer Institute? In last week’s posting, I noted that we’ll have 3 major focal areas: 1) learning the discussion process from the inside, 2) course development and connecting the discussion process to the classroom, and 3) citizen discussions–or engaging discussions beyond the classroom walls. In this entry I’ll focus on #2, how we’ll explore and develop the educational connections of the IF discussion process. Of course, these educational connections will be part of everything we do in the Summer Institute. As you practice the discussion process you’ll be thinking about how you’ll make it work in your classrooms. And the “lightning round” discussions I mentioned last week will focus on topics that explore these educational connections. On top of those activities, we’ll also have Course Planning Discussions, where we talk about and work on your course ideas, and Educational Discussions, where we talk more broadly about the educational implications of the IF discussion process in the classroom.

• Course Planning Discussions

During the Summer Institute, we’ll have slots of time devoted to Course Planning. In some of these you’ll be able to share your ideas with each other and to collaborate with each other on fleshing out these ideas. Everything we do in the Summer Institute depends on taking that “yes–and” attitude of collaborative development. In terms of your course ideas, we’re asking you all to help each other think through the course ideas you each have. This will mean that you can’t be shy or defensive about sharing ideas, whether about your own courses or the courses of others. It also means that your contributions to the discussion should be in the spirit of creative agreement, where you accept the premise offered by another and try to build on it positively. Some of these course development discussions will take place in the whole group, and others will take place in your  smaller afternoon breakout groups. This course development will work best if you continue these discussions beyond the hours of our meetings. Let’s take advantage of the time we have together so we can help each other during informal conversations during the evenings as well.

In other Course Planning discussions we’ll cover some of the more concrete aspects of teaching student-centered discussion courses. We’ll talk about things like: what a typical week might look like, different models for different kinds of classes, student assessment, and managing the classroom. We’ll share some of what we’ve learned from our previous experiences. These discussions will help you sort out your thinking about how you’ll actually teach a student-centered discussion course.

• Educational Discussions

We’ll also have some time for discussions that explore more broadly the educational implications of teaching with the IF discussion process. We’ll talk about things like: different notions of the role of the teacher, meeting the needs of the coming generation of students, and how student-centered discussion might connect to scholarship. Of course, these topics will often blend together with the Course Planning Discussions. In your Lightning Round discussions you’ll also be exploring many of these themes.

As a result of all these activities, we expect you’ll come away from the Summer Institute both with a clear sense of a specific course idea and a more robust sense of how this approach to teaching fits more broadly into your life as an educator.

–Jeff Prudhomme

The Story of Thomas, Developing Social Confidence

My colleague Jack Byrd has decades of experience teaching discussion facilitation at WVU’s School of Engineering. I’ve asked him to share some of his observations and stories about student experiences with discussion facilitation. I offered to post this material for him. So, while this shows up as one of my postings, the rest of the entry is from Jack.

–Jeff Prudhomme

In the blog entries so far Jeff Prudhomme has focused on the discussion process we will be using. Jeff asked me share with you some of my insights on the impact the discussion approach may have on your students. In this entry and in more to follow, I’ll do just that.

One of the most interesting aspects of courses using the IF discussion process is how the course can affect students in their overall academic preparation.  We have seen similar trends in many of the campuses where we have sponsored courses. When students participate in a discussion group, the group can often lead to other relationships as well. These relationships can be crucial for student success.

Consider the case of Thomas described below:

For Thomas, college has been a struggle both academically and financially.  He is in his fourth year of college, but has yet to finish many of his third-year courses.  As an African-American student in the largely white discipline of engineering, Thomas has struggled to find the study partners that he needs to do well.  Thomas is inherently shy and has been reluctant to approach his white classmates to join their study groups.

In the discussion course, Thomas was placed in a team with five white classmates.  (He is the only African-American in the class.)  The team environment has provided Thomas with a structure that is supportive.  The team structure also has forced Thomas to interact with peers in a way that he has not done before.  As the team has developed, Thomas has become more and more comfortable with his classmates.  When he facilitates, he has demonstrated a confidence level that he has rarely shown in other classes.  Thomas has shown an appropriate level of assertiveness which is uncharacteristic of him. He is typically acquiescent about almost everything–usually to his detriment.

But the most lasting impact of the course experience on Thomas is that he now has a study group to work with in each of his classes.  As a result, Thomas grades have gone from mostly C’s and D’s to grades that are mostly B’s.  Thomas credits the course for his “coming out.”

Some lessons learned:

1. Students, when placed in teams that are designed well, can develop the academic and social relationships they need to succeed in college.
2. The sanctuary nature of team discussions makes it possible for shyer students to develop greater confidence and to become actively involved in the class. This confidence often extends to their other courses.

–Jack Byrd

Our Activities at the Summer Institute

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been walking you through the different stages of our discussion process. Now I’d like to focus on how we’ll work on this in our upcoming Summer Institute. Recently my colleague Pete Shively posted a program schedule that shows what we’ll be working on each day. Let me spell out what some of these activities will be.  We’ll have 3 major focal areas: 1) learning the discussion process from the inside (how to facilitate exploratory and collaborative discussions–and how to guide your students to do so), 2) course development and connecting the discussion process to the classroom, and 3) citizen discussions–or engaging discussions beyond the classroom walls.  In this entry I’ll focus on #1, how we’ll work on the discussion process and learning discussion facilitation; I’ll follow up on the other major topics in the near future.

• Demonstration Discussions on The Future of Civil Rights?

For the first 5 mornings we’ll have “Demonstration Discussions” where I or one of my colleagues will facilitate the discussion to demonstrate our approach to facilitation and show you how the discussion process works at different stages. For these sessions (roughly an hour with another hour for a debriefing discussion) you’ll be the discussion participants. We’ll meet as a whole group. You won’t need to do any advance reading or study–just show up ready each day to explore what the future of civil rights could be. I, or one of my colleagues, will work up the discussion notes for each day, so you’ll be able to build on your material from session to session. We’ll basically move through the 3 stages of the IF discussion process in those 5 sessions.  These discussions won’t be complete–just enough to show you what it’s all about. These sessions should serve as a kind of model for you to guide your own facilitation in the afternoon “Developmental Discussions.”

• Developmental Discussions on Intellectual Property and Public Policy

Starting on Monday (August 3rd), we’ll have 5 afternoon sessions where each of you will get to take a turn as discussion facilitator. These sessions will take part in small groups of 5 (we have 15 participants, so that’s 3 groups of 5). We’ll set up these groups and the order of your facilitation in advance (we’ll try to make a mix so you’re not with people all from the same field or same school). As one person facilitates, the rest of the group will be the discussion participants. The facilitator will rotate from day to day. The facilitator will handoff any flip-chart notes generated in the session to the next day’s facilitator so that person can work up the discussion notes for the following day’s session. We call these “developmental sessions” since we’re leaving it up to you to work as thinking groups to develop your own thinking about public policy possibilities for intellectual property.  The facilitator will have a good bit of work to do in developing the material generated in the previous day’s session and thinking about the approach to take in the upcoming session. We’ll help the first session get started by providing a starting point for these discussions.  You’ll have the basic agendas from each day’s Demonstration Discussion, which you’ll be able to use to guide your facilitation efforts in the afternoons. And of course we’ll be around for consultations and guidance. Several of my colleagues and I will sit in as observers on these sessions in order to give you feedback on your facilitation.  The Developmental sessions will last about an hour, with a half-hour for debriefing discussion. We’re hoping that you’ll be able to come up with some really creative ideas in your groups, something that we might eventually be able to craft into a report to feed into citizen discussions.

• Lightning Round Discussions

We’ll start the afternoons when you have “Developmental Discussions” with hour-long practice rounds of discussion facilitation. We’ve taken to calling these “lightning rounds” since they’re intended to be quick-start discussions based on a topic that’s designed to get people talking. These sessions don’t build on each other; they are simple one session discussions on an interesting topic. This should help you focus on practicing your discussion facilitation, which is different from leading a discussion (your focus will be to help the group to think collaboratively–not to steer the group to destinations of your choosing). This will also function as a warm-up for your afternoon Developmental Discussions. You’ll work on these Lightning Rounds in your small breakout groups. You’ll rotate the facilitator from day to day, so overall you’ll each get 2 chances to facilitate (which means 2 chances to get feedback from us).  We’ll set the order in advance, and we’ll make it so you’ll never be facilitating both a Developmental session and a Lightning Round on the same day (giving you time to adjust to the feedback we give you). We’ll choose topics that relate broadly to education and civic engagement and we’ll set these in advance. I bet we’ll find that your groups will come up with some really interesting ideas in these sessions. I wouldn’t be surprise if these Lightning Rounds lead to material we could build on in the future, whether in a project or a thought-piece.

As you can see, a good bit of our focus will be on “learning-by-doing”: experiencing the discussion process from the inside and jumping right in to practice discussion facilitation. From the first Sunday through Friday, there will be a kind of rhythm between the mornings and afternoons: you’ll be discussion participants in the morning Demonstration sessions and have a more active role in the afternoon Lightning Rounds and Developmental sessions. In the other time slots, we’ll work on the other 2 focal areas: course development and educational topics, and facilitating citizen discussions outside the classroom.  I’ll tell you more about those in my next posting.

–Jeff Prudhomme

Exploring Consequences to Revise Possibilities

Over the last several weeks I’ve been describing the Interactivity Foundation’s approach to discussions in terms of three interactive stages.  In previous entries I covered stage one (developing questions to describe the area of concern) and stage two (developing policy possibilities that respond to those questions). In this entry I’ll focus on the third and last stage, consolidating and revising those possibilities by exploring some of their potential real-world implications.

Exploring Consequences from Diverse Perspectives

When you’re generating possibilities, it’s important not to evaluate them as you do so.  It’s vital that you simply get these ideas out. You need to develop them without worrying about whether they are feasible or too unconventional ever to be widely accepted. Once you’ve fleshed out a set of at least four different possibilities, four contrasting approaches that society might take to address the area of concern, then it’s time to start thinking about what these possibilities would be like in the real world.  It’s time to imagine how they might actually unfold and what real-world implications they might have.

When you’re discussing potential consequences, you really have to try to imagine what the world would be like if a given policy possibility was in effect. Imagine that you live in a world where this is how society responds to this or that concern. It’s important to keep in mind that consequences often unfold in unforeseen and unintended ways.  There are differences between short-term and long-term consequences.  Since dramatic short-term effects can often turn people off from a given possibility, this is a good chance to think ahead about whether those effects could change in the long-term.

For example, in the discussions of human genetic technologies one possibility focused providing universal access to human genetic technologies that could benefit health without regard to an individual’s ability to pay. The initial consequences discussed by the panelists focused on how this would dramatically add to the cost of our already too-expensive healthcare system.  Some felt like this showed that the idea was unfeasible and should just be dropped. But as the discussion moved along, people talked about how most health-related genetic services would focus on disease prevention, which meant that over the long-term the cost of such a system should be lower than a system based on disease treatment.

Of course, whether potential consequences are seen as a “harm” or a “benefit” depends on the perspectives of the diverse groups or populations in a society.  So you’ll have to expand your thinking to imagine what some of these different perspectives could be.  You’ll have to challenge yourself to adopt some of these diverse perspectives.  You’ll find that you’ll be able to see different consequences–or you’ll find that the same consequence might be regarded in divergent ways–depending on the different points of view you take up.  You’ll likely discover different kinds of consequences as well.  You might explore the impact on the economy or on the actions of different relevant players (like the genetic technology service providers or patients needing such services), and you might explore broader cultural or moral effects (e.g. “if this policy were in effect, we’d be a more callous society” or “we’d be a more caring and egalitarian society”).

The exploration of potential consequences can give you a better sense of what the policy possibilities really mean. It can also help you to discover connections between some of the possibilities (if some possibilities have very similar consequences, that might be a clue that there’s a way to combine them). You undoubtedly will discover some consequences that you’d rather avoid; which will set you wondering about whether there’s something you could change in the possibility itself to lessen or avoid those consequences.

Revising, Consolidating, and Deleting Possibilities

The exploration of consequences really helps the task of making changes to the possibilities you developed.  You’ll have a more real sense of what each possibility means, and likely a good sense of some things you’ll want to fix in the description of each one–either to make the possibility clearer or to avoid some negative consequences you discovered. You’ll probably see some connections amongst some of the possibilities, which could help you find ways to combine them into a consolidated possibility.  And you may find some possibility that is just not worth keeping. 

This is a time for making some selections , consolidations, and exclusions among the possibilities.  You might enter this stage with a large number of possibilities (maybe eight or ten) and end up with a robust group of five or six.  Our ultimate goal is to come out of the discussions with a set of contrasting possibilities that will stimulate reflective discussions among our fellow citizens.  We have to be careful to focus on that goal in this stage of selection and exclusion.  We don’t exclude possibilities just because we don’t personally like them or we don’t think others will accept them.  We might exclude a possibility if it seems like it won’t really foster thoughtful discussions, or if it seems incoherent or like its negative consequences would keep it from attaining its policy goals (things that might come up in the discussion of consequences).

When you revise possibilities, you might look back at their imagined consequences and ask yourself, “is this a bug or is this a feature?”  A bug is unintended, a glitch, reaveled by negative effects.  A feature may also entail bad effects–but it is inherent in what the policy possibility is all about.  When you revise, you can try to fix the bugs–but changing the features really means altering the basic idea of the possibility you’ve designed.  For example, the genetic technology discussions led to the idea of taking an unrestricted  free-market approach, where people could buy whatever genetic interventions they could afford. Later some panelists wanted to add in some governmental protections for consumers to avoid some of the consumer abuses that might come up. But they eventually realized that this would really mean changing a fundamental feature of the possibility. They decided that it was more in the spirit of this policy approach to leave it up to consumers as free individuals to take whatever action they could muster on their own.

This is a time for a sort of final review of the possibilities you’ve developed–not just as individuals but as a whole group.  When you look back at the big questions you raised in the first stage of the discussion process, and when you look at the whole set of possibilities you’ve developed, you might wonder whether there are any obvious gaps. You might ask how your possibilities respond to the questions raised early on–and whether there are any new possibilities that come to mind. In our approach to discussions, we’ve found that there is almost always time for late entries.  Whether within the course of a single discussion session or over the course of a whole discussion project, there is often a time when the conversation lags and it seems like everything has been said–and then a new insight will emerge.  Often those late insights are quite powerful ones.

This period of review and revision should help you clarify your descriptions of the different possibilities.  You can clarify how the possibilities respond to some of the questions raised early on in the project. You can clarify the thinking and beliefs that animate them. You can be mindful of how they might lead to different kinds of effects in a diverse and complex society. Above all you’ll want to think about how your description of these possibilities might help others to engage and expand their own imaginative thinking about what could be.

–Jeff Prudhomme

(More than) 36 Hours in Madison, Wisconsin

On the lighter side of the Summer Institute, I just happened to notice this little NY Times article on “36 Hours in Madison Wisconsin” and thought you might want to give it a look. Of course Pete Shively and Adolf Gundersen, both long time denizens of Madison, can give you the scoop about things to do in your down time. But this might set some ideas in motion.

–Jeff Prudhomme