COURSE APPROACH

INSTRUCTIONAL EXPERTISE
The leaders for this course, R. John Miner, MSES, Mike Renquist, D.Min., and Betsy Aylin, PhD, bring many years of experience in electric utility management, leadership development, executive coaching, organization development, and instructional design.  They will provide the content appropriate for this course based on their depth of study in the field of leadership, their many years of working with utility leaders, and their own leadership including in a utility setting.  Their commitment for this and all workshops and training is to enable participants to learn in a collaborative, highly interactive environment that fosters experimentation, learning, self-reflection, and taking on new challenges.  In addition to classroom instruction during the week, the instructors will guide the development of the post-course projects, described below.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
The instructional style for this course includes whole class and small group discussion, team problem solving, shared reflection, and learning exercises that encourage open dialogue and personal inquiry.  Participants will be working in “cohort” groups on the action learning cases, staying with the same team throughout the course.  We believe learning happens best when participants feel free to ask the questions that are most challenging to them and explore solutions with others, rather than assuming they or the instructors have to know everything.  While we have developed and will address learning objectives for the course, we know that some of the most valuable learning comes from the participants interactions as they learn from each other.

INTERACTION
This course will be highly interactive, not just sitting and listening.  Your interactions will be through exercises, discussion, and activities designed to increase your learning, self-understanding, and ability to apply the information and insights to your work and leadership. While the course provides valuable content that may be new, it does so in ways that are designed to actively engage participants.  Listening passively to lectures is not part of this course.

SELF-REFLECTION
Effective leaders understand themselves well, and reflect on how they work with others and approach opportunities and challenges.  We discuss this directly in Module 2 and also weave reflection throughout the activities of this course.  Some call this way of learning “praxis” which means reflection on action.  This is a habit we hope to build throughout the course, because we know it will serve our participants well as they lead others in the future.  Through this process, participants may come to understand how their own “defensive routines” get in the way of effective leadership and deeper connection with others and may also come to know their strengths that can be tapped as they build leadership capability.

ACTION LEARNING
We will be using an approach in this course, called Action Learning, which has been described as, “One of the most powerful tools for moving an organization’s culture…”   Our Action Learning Cases are built around real and current utility challenges and opportunities which have been submitted by utility executives.  Our results will be given to the utilities for their use after the course.   We have descriptions of the situations and information sufficient to provide background and context for the cases.  Participants will seek to come up with solutions or useful approaches for each of the cases.   The Action Learning process involves problem solving, planning, and self-reflection as participants gain understanding in their own approach to working out solutions as they help solve a real utility issue.  See the description of this approach in the Appendix.

APPLICATION OF LEARNING
As we go through the course, we will constantly be looking at the ways this information applies to your work situation at home.  We know that learning that is not internalized and quickly applied is lost.  Through our various course activities and reflections, you will be asked to think through real work situations and to imagine how the content might apply to those situations.  In addition to these exercises, we will ask three (3) simple questions to support internalizing and putting this learning into action. 

Those questions are:

1. What?  What was an insight, a take-away, a knowledge gained?  What are the things (knowledge, insight, skill, understanding, idea) that stand out in your mind from this module?  What did you pay particular attention to or what attracted you in the module?
2. So what? What is the importance of that “what” to your personal or professional life?  Why does the “what” matter?  What might be the impact or outcome of applying that knowledge, insight, skills you identified as “what.”
3. Now what? What will you now do, say, or believe as a result of your having that What and So What at top of mind.  What commitment will you make?  What change will you bring forward?  What is the next step?  List one commitment here: