At the First Hand Workshop, participants are introduced to the Open Hand mindset and model. 

• Examine and explore why the Open Hand matters, how the model works, and what results the mindset creates. 

• Participate in simple exercises that explore the Open Hand model, such as the relationship between caring and context as well as creativity and cognition.

• Learn about equity-based teaching strategies, visual learning, embodied cognition, and mindful learning. 

In these three sessions, you will enhance your metacognitive skills through coaching & collaboratively practicing with each other to increase your self-awareness, refine your social-emotional intelligence, and engender a relationship-rich class environment.

• Practice basic mindfulness and coaching skills such as listening, clarifying, reframing, articulating, questioning, and visioning. 

• Practice coaching and conversing with students to enhance their metacognitive learning skills and increase their growth mindset.

• Participate in effective collaborative exercises that you can use with your students such as "analytic teams," "fish bowl," and "role playing." 

• Some risk and even "failure" is involved because you are challenged as you practice new skills to become more proficient. 

By modeling social-emotional intelligence in the classroom, students are shown how to respect and appreciate each other. In addition, students become more active co-creators in the class when they are exercising metacognitive skills about how to learn. Teachers and students, when they practice these skills, build an inclusive classroom that encourages a diversity of perspectives and voices as well as supporting student success. 

These Hands-On workshops are a co-creation between the facilitators and the participants, and are customized to fit the mission or culture of each institution. These workshops involve a selection of texts--often from the Humanities such as poetry, art, film, short story, music, tv commercials, or almost anything!--to teach the strategies. Participants get a hands on "experience" of the strategies, which they can then try in their classes. These will be three hour workshops.  

In these one hour sessions, you help each other explore your own learning design ideas or refine your existing class activities. 

Instead of creating your class activities in isolation or not knowing where you can go for ideas, these sessions build a professional learning community, a safe place where you are encouraged to search, experiment, struggle, play around, tweak, improve and succeed.   

• Creatively solve problems together about your specific learning activities.  

• Quickly research and pull effective learning strategies from various TLCs to suggest solutions to the problems.

• Practice your coaching skills by adopting a curious mindset, asking questions, and suggesting ideas from your research or experience. 

In the end, you will trust your own creative ideas, gain confidence in your abilities to design, and rely on resources outside of you, either expert websites or your colleagues' ideas, strengths, and experiences. 

This Out of hand conference is where participants bring all their enthusiasm and guts together. They show what they've learned to others in their whole community, to other interested instructors, professors, administrators, & staff. The participants are given a free hand in choosing their learning experience projects. They present their experiences or experiments--at an out of hand conference!--at separate times and places through different delivery modalities at their institution. This conference gets them to  think about attending a Teaching and Learning Conference (of some kind) to share their their discoveries. Hopefully they add their class experiments and successes to their e-portfolio.