By Tom Lenz
For the past five years I have been assisting the Partnership for Resilience, a cross-sector collaborative of public schools, health care and community organizations in southern Cook County and far southern Illinois. Family and community engagement (FACE) is a huge priority for these schools. Earlier this year we planned a June workshop at Governors State Community with Eyal Bergman, a FACE expert from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When the pandemic hit, we reluctantly decided to move the face-to-face workshop to Zoom. Eyal’s good, I thought, but a 3-hour webinar? Would you believe the three hours FLEW by and the evaluation from the 75 participants were almost all “would highly recommend this to a colleague”. The most-frequent comment: “I wish the workshop had been longer.” What just happened? To be sure, Eyal’s core messages on family engagement are terrific. He’s partnered with the foremost expert on the topic at Harvard, Dr. Karen Mapp. Her dual capacity framework is a practical and powerful approach that more and more schools are embracing.
But Eyal did two things extremely well that are worth noting: First, he expertly used Zoom functions to build participant engagement right from the start. Eyal led with four questions about family and community engagement and used the polling function to share the participant responses in real time. These four questions previewed key elements of his presentation, and he referred back to them throughout the morning. He also used the “white board” function to get a range of responses to other questions he posed. The comments appeared in a quick and dynamic way which created additional engagement with the audience. Second, he built in large chunks of time for small group work and for breaks. In fact, his time budget for the three hours looked like this: • Presenter talk time – 60 minutes • Time in breakout groups – 65 minutes •Interactive presenter/participant time – 30 minutes • Breaks – 25 minutes