Describe in your own words, power-from-within. Can you give examples from your own life?

Senge’s chapter on Team Learning is basically the same as my research. Consequently, please read my paper.

Readings: Creating Partnerships that Work by Dan Gerber: CREATING_PARTERSHIPS_THAT_WORK.doc CREATING_PARTERSHIPS_THAT_WORK.doc – Alternative Formats

The questions below are from the article: Creating Partnerships that Work

(1) Describe in your own words, power-from-within. Can you give examples from your own life?

(2) Describe in your own words, power-with. Can you give examples from your own life?

(3) Describe in your own words, praxis. Can you give examples from your own life?

(4) Describe Maxwell’s new type of inquiry? Can you give examples from your own life?

My Notes: Team learning is a balance between dialogue and discussion

• Discussion (also sometimes called debate): – different views are presented and defended.

• Dialogue: a process of inquiry and reflection

• The purpose of dialogue is to go beyond any one individual’s understanding.

• Group insights are created

• Complex issues are explored.

• Dialogues are diverging (they wander). They do not seek agreement (like in discussions) but a richer (and perhaps) and new grasp of complex issues.

• A deeper trust level is developed (over time) than possible with discussion.

• Mental models are discovered and examined.

• Decisions or agreements are NOT the outcome.

• (Deeper understanding is the outcome.)

• Individuals hopefully gain insights that could not be achieved by one self-alone. How do we participate in a dialogue?

• By observing your own thinking. Bohm calls this:

• Suspending Assumptions and holding them up for examination.

• This takes us deeper by revealing the hidden prejudice in our beliefs.

• Examples: Earth was made for humankind vs. Earth was made for all living things. Charity vs. Social justice.

Characteristics of David Bohm’s Dialogue:

• Bohm felt that in spite of claims to pursue “truth” scientific endeavor is often infected with personal ambition, a rigid defense of theory, and the weight of tradition – all at the expense of creative participation toward the common goals of science.

• In nature of collective thought a “pool of knowledge” has accumulated throughout human evolution. (this thought is both tacit and overt) which gives rise too much of our perception of the world. . .

• An example is: Earth was made for humankind.

• An example of seeing the whole is: a watch that has been smashed into random pieces is just parts. Parts have an integral relationship to one another, resulting in a functional whole.

• Conversations have a life of their own.

• A flow of meaning between people

• The purpose of dialogue is to go beyond any one individual’s understanding and reveal the incoherence in our thoughts

• Thought, because of our mental models, stops tracking reality and acts like a program.

• In dialogue people between observers of their own thinking by,

• The primary objective of Dialogue is to develop a new state of awareness and perception of increasing subtle movements of thought along with the underlying assumptions which hide this movement of normal consciousness.

• A secondary goal or benefit is the emergence of a less mechanical and more intelligent relationship to knowledge itself.

• In dialogue an “impersonal fellowship” can emerge creating a shared meaning.

• Dialogues start with no set agenda but just a general topic.