Facilitators often hear alumni say, “I wish I had these skills earlier in life.” To do that, the focus on getting the skills into the hands of educators has become important.
At the college level, not only are more professors being equipped, but so are the students.
In this episode, Adam J. Salgat and Mike Desparrois check in with Rob Martin, Dean of the Isaacson School of Communication, Arts & Media at Colorado Mountain College.
They discuss how the students have become more self-aware after going through the class, how the skills have helped them communicate and meet the needs of the staff and students during the pandemic. Then Rob explains how the skills have made a major difference in the way he leads a classroom and how he connects with his family.
ROB MARTIN
Rob oversees diverse and vibrant programs that deal with communication at the intersection of Technology and the Arts. He’s been in education since 1995 formally but has always been somewhat involved in training. Rob believes communication and the interactions between people are the foundation for all society and hopes to teach students to tell lasting stories that help to move the needle on social issues.
AI-generated dictation of the podcast audio
Please note that this transcription was completed using AI software. Occasionally, unanticipated grammatical, syntax, homophones, and other interpretive errors are inadvertently transcribed by the software. Please excuse any errors that have escaped final proofreading.
Adam Foldit:
Hey listener, we would love it if you could take a quick moment to give our podcast a review on iTunes, Spotify, or leave us a message on our Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Hello and welcome to the Our Community Listens podcast. My name is Adam Foldit. And with me today is Mike Desparrois, leader of education initiatives for our community lessons. Hey Mike, how are you?
Mike Desparrois:
I’m great, Adam, how are you today?
Adam Foldit:
I’m doing well, things are going pretty good over here and I’m excited for our podcast because we have a new guest with us today from Colorado. His name is Rob Martin. He is the Dean of the Isaacson School of Communication, arts and media at Colorado Mountain College. How are you Rob?
Rob Martin:
I’m doing great. Thank you.
Adam Foldit:
Thanks so much for joining our podcast today. We’re going to get into a lot of different things that you’re going to be helping with Our Community Listens with. But first I want to talk a little bit about how long you’ve been a facilitator with Our Community Listens and what you enjoy most about being a facilitator.
Rob Martin:
Oh, first I heard about Our Community Listens through my wife, it was part of a group in 2014 and then I participated in Our Community Listens in 2015. After that, training for the facilitators in October of 2016.
Adam Foldit:
So, for about four years. And what is one of the things you enjoy most about being a facilitator? Why do you like teaching these skills to new people?
Rob Martin:
It all boils down to the fact that I like meeting people. I really just really enjoy seeing how they grow when we facilitate these kind of meetings.
Adam Foldit:
Awesome. I’ll let Mike jump in here with our next question, as we start getting into more topics.
Mike Desparrois:
Yeah, Rob, so I’m really interested in learning from you today. And as a facilitator, having worked with high school students and working at the college and being a Dean, what are some of the skills you have used that you’ve learned as a facilitator from the communication skills training and used those skills to help support you in your position, whether it’s working with students, or working with faculty, or working with staff, or maybe even the community that you work with up there at Colorado Mountain College?
Rob Martin:
Yeah. When I first started becoming a facilitator, I was still in the classroom. I was teaching full time. And so that was a bunch of classes that I taught and it was amazing to see how quickly I could incorporate these skills right into the classroom. I teach storytelling, video animation, those kind of things. And so those skills that we learned as facilitators transfer directly into that. But then it took on a different turn as I started to teach it more because I realized that the basic thing that I needed to do as a teacher was listen. I really needed to hear those students’ ideas, listen to what they had to say. And then, only then after having listened and allowing them to try and solve the problems themselves, start to help them out with technical issues or other things. It’s creating that relationship that is huge. And if you can do that in the classroom, you’ve really changed a student’s life. And so that’s been important to me from the facilitation trainings. I just walked in straight right with that right out of the classroom. And it changed my classroom tremendously.
Mike Desparrois:
Rob, I love how you talked about the listening and listening to your students, what they’re coming with. So I take in the idea of a skill that you learn and not necessarily saying the kids have to learn how to do the listening right? But you taking on the role as the teacher, to using that skill of listening to them, to what they were really coming with. Did you notice a big change in the relationships you had with your students when you really started to listen to them at that deep, active, reflective listening level?
Rob Martin:
Absolutely. When you listen to students and allow them to guide their education, they take a stake in that education and they will move forward really quickly with our own ideas. And of course, some of that has to do with what I teach. I teach video storytelling. So it’s a big thing for them to find their own voice, being able to really focus on the listening helps with that.
Mike Desparrois:
That’s really cool. I know when I was in the classroom, working with my kids, there were so many times I felt the pressure to get through the curriculum and the content that I would ask questions and very little would I allow them to respond because I was in such a hurry that if they didn’t come up with an answer quick enough, I found myself answering for them. And there was no listening part of that. And I know the first time I took the class, I was like, “Oh wow.” I’m not even allowing my kids an opportunity to learn because I’m just throwing stuff at them and I’m the speaker. And they’re probably not listening to me because I’m not listening to them, even when I’m asking them a question. So it’s interesting because I taught Junior High in high school and how that translates even at the college level, and it’s just a human thing as well too.
What skills, for college students, that we’ve learned in communication skills training do you see students struggling the most with and for us to find ways to support them the most with, or what skills have you used, or tools to support them? I know role modeling is a big part of that, obviously with you doing listening for them. But what are some of the other skills you see them struggling with, especially during this crazy pandemic timeline right now?
Rob Martin:
I think there’s a couple answers. Dr. Heather Exby, also a facilitator for OCL at CMC at Colorado Mountain College. And she and I taught the three day, Our Community Listens class to a full class of 18 to 20 year olds. That was probably the most difficult class we taught. And a large piece of that is because a lot of the content asks you to reflect on your life and they don’t have as much to do that. Another piece behind it interesting is that they felt very… It took a while to get into the listening phase on their own. They really wanted to just Google the answers. Why don’t they just go on YouTube and find a 30 second clip of how to do whatever that [inaudible 00:06:54] the biggest struggle.
What was really great coming out of it was afterward we did 100% interviews with and asked them anything. And every single one of them said that the self-awareness that the disc gave them was [inaudible 00:07:13] that really changed their vision of how they could relate to other people. And then the second piece of it, that was really neat, was they said, a large part of what they learned was that they’re just moving too fast. They need to slow down. And I think that’s a really important thing is actually someone at 18, 19, 20 years old learning that is really huge. And so I think those two things were the big takeaways for them. Thinking about it in a broader context as I stepped into the Dean role and I started to become [inaudible 00:07:46] for faculty, what I think is really intriguing is working with the faculty to allow the students to model behavior back. That we’re taught a lot about as facilitators is modeling that behavior, modeling the way you stand, modeling everything as you’re speaking.
And I think that’s real for our faculty to teach to those students that you now need to model to us. Again, thinking about the students we have, they’re going to be journalists. They have to find their own voice to interview people and they’re terrified. And so we do a huge amount of modeling experience back and then teaching those students how to look for those non-verbal behaviors that we know is a huge part of our communication.
Mike Desparrois:
Very cool.
Adam Foldit:
Rob, I find it pretty interesting to hear you talk about this, because this is a similar field that I’m in. Being a journalist is something I did for a couple of years in my early 20s and all through high school. And so I think about, if I was approached at that time, with these types of communication skills, what kind of impact do you think it could have had on myself at that time? So I ask you, you mentioned it in a broad statement about, you think this has a pretty big impact and that self-reflection on these students, but is there anything else, could you expand on that a little more on why you think this is important or potentially extremely beneficial for them at a early age to have this type of communication skills put in front of them and these types of self-reflection?
Rob Martin:
Sure. I think at the very beginning when students are coming to camp, they fall into two camps. They’re either the gear people or they’re this people. And they really want to dive into those and start to tell that story. And there’s a lot of self-discovery that people have to make in order to take those steps, to make real communications, to make real connections with other people. And that’s that important part, you know this is a journalist. I mean, we spend five minutes before we did any of this today, just connecting and that’s hard to do using all the distance tools that we’re now used to, but a new student falling into the world of journalism, if they are really afraid of just not [inaudible 00:10:16] themselves. So that’s a big part of that disc when they went through that start up that part and they learned about themselves.
And then they learned about how can I look at other people and see what this attributes those other people might have. It really fundamentally changes the way that they’re able to interact with other people and that is amazing. You will see a student turn a corner with their work and how quickly they can connect with other people and make those interviews. It’s just amazing to see it happen. So it’s really a shortcut to getting to that connection, that human connection that’s really important for a journalist or a documentarian to have.
Adam Foldit:
I think that sounds like some great lessons for them to learn. Like you’ve already said, at a young age and will potentially bring their work along, not only their personal life, but bring their work along at a faster pace.
Rob Martin:
We have a fairly well-known outdoor filmmaker that lives in our valley. He did a lot of long climbing documentaries, amazing stuff. And he sat down and talked through what it is journalists need to know. And it was like a checklist, Our Community Listens and what we teach, you’ve got to watch for the non-verbals, you’ve got to connect with them. Your job is not to provoke, but to listen. And it’s just incredible to see this curriculum be understood by someone who’s never even taken it. And who’s been really successful at it.
Mike Desparrois:
Rob, you’ve mentioned the part about connection on the human connection. And it’s so interesting because I talk about this a lot in the field of education. We were taught content, curriculum and pedagogy, and very little skills to deal with people. Yet we’re dealing with the most precious resource which is our kids. And it’s so interesting because when you go through the class, you take the class and you start to realize that this isn’t how I need to look at other people and how they act, but how am I acting and what can I do to support and help people out? And it really is the game changer to realize how you connect with people is way more important than trying to say how they need to connect with you.
And I love how you were able to use that in your journalism with your journalism folks too, because I have no background in journalism, but it’s really about people and it doesn’t matter what jobs we have, or who we’re working with. This goes all over the place with your family, your friends, your community, if you have faculty or staff underneath you, or you have people above you, it’s really how you show up in the world with that humane connection piece.
Rob Martin:
Yeah, absolutely. You’d asked before about the pandemic a little bit, and it was intriguing to me. Oh, I want to say, probably in mid April, I had two of my faculty that I work with, come to me and say, “We were surprised when we had the two weeks to go from face-to-face classes to completely online.” And we all changed the way that we had to communicate because we couldn’t be there personally to talk about it. And we would go into our bi-weekly meetings with you, weekly meetings with you. And we would have this expectation that you would come in and start saying, “Okay, so there’s this new tool in canvas, and you need to do X, Y, Z, or you’ve got to use this new filter to make your, your audio better.” And he said every one of those, you started out with the question of, “How can I help?” And just spend most of your time sitting while we solved our own problems.
And anytime we asked you what it is that we need to get across to our students, your answer was always the same. “I don’t care, just connect with them.” I mean, they’re already professionals in the area they’re teaching, and the thing that we have to do is learn how to connect in this new mode of Zoom and Webex and that’s really hard. So we spent a lot of time learning new video tools, how to have synchronously or asynchronously, I can use all the age of speak if you want.
But the reality is like, well, “Get yourself in front of them.” Whether that’s a video that you recorded or a zoom session or something else you’ve got to get in front of them and learn that. And that’s important, not just at the students to the outcomes. And I was a K-12 teacher. No, it’s all about those outcomes. We’ve got to hit the outcome. Reality is if the connection is built between the human beings, if [inaudible 00:15:11] connect, that’s what builds that. And so that’s what we spend our time with. And what was amazing was that it wasn’t just about that relationship between the two human beings, but giving a space for everybody to deal with what we were all going through. I mean, the pandemic was hard for everyone and still is. We suddenly are in a very different waving, and so we had to give our students and our enough airtime to just breathe a bit and we’ll worry about the outcomes at another time. I mean, we all got there, all the classes made it to them, but we have to focus on that interpersonal communication.
Mike Desparrois:
It sounds like you’re really taking into consideration the people. And we obviously know that that’s our focus, our community lessons. And I just want to say thank you because you’re right. So many people are struggling in different ways with the pandemic and that human connection, whether it helps them through a class or whether it helps them through the next few hours of their life, just because they’re struggling so bad, I think that’s super important. So just listening to you talk about you taking the opportunity to do that is something that personally, I don’t have any skin in the game out there in Colorado, but I think that’s awesome that it matters to you guys and that you’re doing that.
Rob Martin:
Oh, it’s one of the things I’m most proud about with Colorado Mountain College. They have bent over backwards to stay in touch with students and to give faculty methods and give faculty ways that they can contact students, as you can imagine. Some of them just went off the radar. When we said, “Don’t come back from spring break.” We didn’t even know where they were. And we would pull out all the stops just to get them a phone call, a Zoom, whatever else. “Are you okay, how can we get back in the classroom?” Because when you started something, you’d probably want to finish that. And it gave students ground to go back into the virtual class. And we did a great job as a college, trying to support both the students and the fact we’re getting that done.
Mike Desparrois:
You know Rob, saying once the kids left for spring break and all of a sudden the world stopped. And you had to find ways to connect and get kids back into school and online, and where are they at? Do they have connection and all that. Can you talk a little bit about Colorado Mountain College? Because you all are a very unique college in many ways, with the campuses that you have and how you’re spread out in the mountains. And just so people can get really an understanding of how you connect with kids and how different it is for you all and what you guys do and support for being that adventure college. I know I had a lot of friends who attended Colorado mountain college and got degrees from them or from you all. And so I think it would be great if you can give us just a brief overview of Colorado Mountain College as well.
Rob Martin:
Sure. Essentially if you imagine a Colorado ski resort, we probably have a campus there with the exception [inaudible 00:18:26]. We have [inaudible 00:18:28], steamboat in Leadville and Vail and all those great places. I think we have 11 campuses now, some of them are resident campuses. They have full on [inaudible 00:18:41] and everything else. We have three of those. We have some that are local community hubs, if you will, where there aren’t residence halls, but there’s a lot of students that go there. We’re focused on giving two different types of education. There’s one type of student that comes and is going to take classes and transfer to another school. We have another group of students who come and we are their destination. And so the cool thing is that we’ve been able to develop just believably niche program. I mean, I think about scary operations, which is where they teach people how to drive snowcats and shape the park. And those are the people who go on to do that for the Olympics.
My programs, in the Isaacson school, we have graphic design, digital media and photography. Which sounds pretty common across the country, but realizing that you’re in the beautiful mountains of Aspen, Colorado, doing that, a lot of the people who’ve also done really well in those areas. We often have somebody who will draw and who has a Pulitzer, or who started a Hollywood film company, things like that. We have great links to our communities. And I think that’s, what’s really important about us. We’re about 18,000 students or so throughout the… I don’t have the newest numbers. It’s probably this year because a lot of people are taking time off. What’s been great is because we’re that local college community, also go and give them the best degree that they might really want, is really just some… We’re focused on training the nurses, doctors… Nurses, not doctors, sorry. We’re focused training the nurses and the EMTs and our areas, the police officers, things like that.
Mike Desparrois:
Lots of opportunities out there for sure. I know it’s always great. I know I’ve got a couple of friends, like I said, that attended. One of them works up in Steamboat Springs and he works on the band cats like you were talking about, went through the program. And he gets to see all those great Olympians that go and train up there for the Olympics up in Steamboat as a result. So he’s always posting that stuff. With this interesting year of coming back to school, not only are we all dealing with the pandemic, but you also had the fires that were breaking out all over the mountains and it was a crazy thing that was happening.
How did you use your skills Rob, to just keep everybody focused on the main thing and getting faculty or staff back in as well too? Because you’re such a well-spoken and just easygoing guy, and I love that. And your calmness is just wonderful to listen to, and I can see you teaching in class and kids connecting and staff connecting. So how did you keep folks just calm and focused on the prize, knowing that there was fires and you’re trying to deal with the pandemic and anything else that this year has thrown at us?
Rob Martin:
I got really lucky. The fire that was closest to any of our campuses, was about three miles from our Spring Valley, which happens to be where the media stuff is taught. The campus VP for that is also Our Community Listens facilitator Dr. Heather Exby. And so she was leading that campus and great. We would have meetings and she would just literally open the readings and we would say, “What do we need [inaudible 00:22:20], what do we need to hear from you?” And let everybody do their jobs, but at the same time really focusing on what is most important in these crises and just leaving the blinder on to the rest, which was fantastic. I know we had the week before class started, the Canyon was closed, the fire was still raging and I had a faculty meeting. They started out with, “Well, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if?” And I just said, “Stop, let’s just breathe. Let’s just do what you do. Make yours go, you know how to do that, you’ve done it for years.”
Our biggest concern is going to be, are the students able to get here? And if they can, then ready. And I think it just kind of came across as, “Once we gave them that charge [inaudible 00:23:21], it was just our job to just listen to what they needed to do.” Mostly they solve their own problems.
And then if there was something that they couldn’t figure out, like we have a guy who teachers for us from Denver and he wasn’t sure if he was even going to be able to make it there. And it was a simple, like, “What do I do if I can’t get there for the first day of classes? It’s a physics class, I actually have to be there, what am I going to do?” And I was like, “Well, one of two things, either all show up, [inaudible 00:23:54]. And we’ll split up on a Zoom or you’ll make the six hour drive and we’ll pay for a hotel room, we’ll figure it out.” I think that’s key, just being able to listen and authentically understand what the faculty and the student problems were and then just be able to move through those.
Mike Desparrois:
Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Rob, I want to know a little bit about how the, Our Community Listens skills have been a benefit to you personally, and how they’ve made a difference in your family.
Rob Martin:
I’m really lucky in that my wife has also taken Our Community Listens and so we get to hold each other accountable. And often when I’m not at my best, and she’ll look at me and say, “Hey, think about what you’re doing.” Which is really helpful to have, I would highly encourage everybody to take it with your family. The second piece is that it really changed my relationship with my daughter and my son, in that I’m really listening to what they say. And I find it super important. It’s so easy at the end of a hard day of 10 hours of Zoom meetings to not want to talk about anime with my daughter. It’s just one more thing online that I don’t really want to do, but I have to find it in myself to actually be there and be present and listen to that and how much I’m learning about her and her journey is really important.
And then the last piece of that is that when you see your 12 year old daughter, just sit down and just listen with a friend, and think about what that might change in her life versus the way I lived my life prior to OCL is going to be awesome just to see how she moves through life with some of those skills that hopefully we’re modeling for.
Mike Desparrois:
That’s awesome to hear. It sounds like there’s some good modeling going on in that household.
Rob Martin:
Some days, not all days.
Mike Desparrois:
Well, I think it’s important that you pointed out a really good thing about even you’ve taken the class, you’re a facilitator, you’ve done classes, you’re a practitioner, but above all we’re humans, right? And so as humans, we forget, we mess up, we make mistakes, but it’s always being able to come back to the things that we’ve learned and understand that just because we learn something doesn’t mean we are amazing at it. It’s a continuous journey to stop sometimes and say, “Oh, my daughter, my son, my wife, my mom, whoever is saying something really important to me, I need to connect.” And sometimes putting down our cellphones or turning off the TV or just really tuning in, that’s one of the great things about the class is it helps you be very self aware of yourself and take a look at what’s going on in your surroundings and not so much focused on what other people aren’t doing, but what you should be doing to support them.
And yeah, as a parent of two teenage daughters, one who turns 18 in two days, and one who turns 15 in a month, I’m constantly being reminded that sometimes I’m not the best listener, or sometimes I just need to be silent, and not give advice and let them follow up and solve their own problems as well too. So it’s a constant struggle, but I think the struggle and the learning process makes us better, to be able to role model and stuff as we continue to go on with… Do you find that true as well, Rob?
Rob Martin:
Absolutely. Early this summer, I called my mother, lives in Florida, over half a country away. I [inaudible 00:27:38] her and just trying to just poach every monkey she has like, “You should do this. I think this way, you should do these things.” And my wife was sitting across from me and just looked at me in a way [inaudible 00:27:54] that changed things. I mean after I finally got it through my thick skull, “Hey, it’s time to listen for a while.” Hey, and as she needed support, helping her with all those storm shutters, she really needed support when we go there. So we actually packed our whole family and drove there and it was large because my wife said, “Hey, you should listen to your mom. She’s really struggling with this stuff.”
And it was one of those big eye-opening moments of like, “Oh, wait, I teach stuff and here, I’m just one after another because we’re in a mess [inaudible 00:28:36], it’s really hard for her to deal with. And I’m still far, far away.” And me trying to describe how to fix her [inaudible 00:28:47] or something over the phone is useful, but it’s more useful to listen to what she really needs.
Mike Desparrois:
Absolutely. It’s so interesting, even trying to do stuff on the phone with our parents as well too, my mom’s up in Colorado. And so even just listening to her and what she’s going through, because she can’t get outside really with the pandemic and her health issues with her age. And sometimes it’s just listening to all lives issues and problems, but also understanding this is someone who doesn’t have human connection at all, other than through the phone. And she’s not a texter. So it’s a powerful tool to be able to just let them breathe into that moment time. Right.
Rob Martin:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think we need that. Not just interpersonally, not with our families. No, not with our students and our faculty, but I mean, we need that as a country and a society right now, because there’s so much going on where people, they’re listening just once and not listening just to listen.
Mike Desparrois:
Yeah. Rob, I know you mentioned Dr. Heather Exby several times and I definitely want to pay tribute to her. She was one of the very first people I’ve met through OCL. Sharon invited me to come out for the hundredth class that you all had and celebrated in Aspen last year, it was a year ago and Dr. XB and Jim English were actually teaching that class. And I know he’s a retired Colorado Mountain College person, but I think he had just retired like a couple of weeks prior to the class. And it was such a joy to hear their experiences and how they served, not just at Colorado Mountain College, but the communities up there in the mountains as well. Is there anything else you’d like to add about some of the skills that, or some of the things that you all are doing with the college students this year at Colorado Mountain College, whether it be you or Heather or anybody else?
Rob Martin:
Yeah. It’s a great question, Mike. I think we have been really overwhelmed at the college level with, and you know this probably more than most, changing modality from face-to-face to online takes a lot and takes a lot to make sure that you’re building the connections. And so we’ve been very focused on that piece of it and less focused on really how do we help the students understand through listening. And some of that is just because some of those faculty haven’t been able to take OCL, that entire plan where we wanted them to take OCL shifted with the pandemic because we don’t offer it in person right now. So we were headed down a lot of those roads and it’s a little bit frustrating to see that stop. Although at the same time, I do think that we are helping the faculty focus on the right things with the students.
The other thing that’s been a little bit of a difficulty for us, has been looking at our K-12 districts. We serve 15 of them and they all have a different response to the pandemic. And so really looking to those educators at the K-12 level who have had Our Community Listens training and seeing how frustrated they get with working with their administrators who maybe aren’t making the right decisions. So it’s really interesting to see how it’s all working out, but I don’t think we have any answer. So I’m sorry, but I don’t really have a great soundbite for that one. We keep doing what we’re doing and trying to do it as best we can.
Mike Desparrois:
I think that’s the key, it’s just know what we know, know what skills we have and just keep going forward, supporting folks with those, right?
Rob Martin:
Yeah, I do think something’s going to shake loose soon here, in the next couple of weeks. Our biggest employers across the board are almost all the large ski resorts, Vail resorts and Aspen Ski Co. And they’ve all come to talk to us about how do we get some interpersonal communication, basically OCL training within those places, because things are shifting where they aren’t allowed to get their J visa students anymore. So that changes who their employee market is. And so fortunately Ski Co. has had a really significant number of people take Our Community Listens, and they’re reaching out to Colorado Mountain College to say, “Well, can you help our people understand these types of things?” And so we’re still working on that a lot, but I think it’ll help to turn a corner with that group of people who are really very geographically volatile. They’re here for three months for the ski season and then they’re climbing for three months. So we’ll see how that all works out.
Mike Desparrois:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
Rob Martin:
You talked about retiring at the K-12. And I guess the only way I can really do that is I think in some ways, one of the things that attracted me to take Our Community Listens after learning about it from my wife was that I was already doing some of those skills in that K-12 classroom and then I started out with students. My first class was a typing class, if you can imagine. And I started out with them and they said, “We hate this.” And I said, “So do I.” Nobody really likes typing class. And I said, “So what do you want to learn?” And they said, “We want to learn how to design games.” And I said, “Well, that’s cool. I know how to do that. I’ll tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. If you can hit all of the outcomes for typing for the state of Colorado, which is 90% accuracy, 30 words a minute for two minutes, then I’ll teach you how to design games.” And they said, “Okay.” And they did it in a week and a half.
So we had most of the semester to actually teach games. And in that class, most of what I did was just say, “Well, now we’re outside the boundaries of the outcomes that the state requires we’re doing what we want to do. So what do you want to do?” And they were like, “Being able to take and hide that in.” Then the formal training at OCL was… it’s really changed the way I teach and I think it would change the way a lot of K-12 teachers would teach.
Mike Desparrois:
Rob, I love the way you’re saying that. And the reason is, we have a education research project going on, we’re diving into the research to see what do we need to do in OCL to reach education, and the focus is on the adults, because if the adults can do these skills in model, then they build that sense of belonging for kids, which is a big research topic. And they also build that self-efficacy that they believe in themselves. So everything you talked about in your typing class, and I had flashbacks to my typing class where they’re like, “C, C, B, C.” Right? And it’s like, “Yeah, I can type with my pointer fingers pretty good. I don’t think I ever paid attention, but I also didn’t have that teacher who really made it fun or believed in us, or took us to a level to where we wanted to believe. And you did that.
And so it’s huge what you talked about and how you got the kids to believe in themselves. And all of a sudden they had it done in several weeks and you’re able to get them to do other things as well too, while they were still practicing their typing skills. And so that’s awesome. And I’m so excited to share our research as we continue to go on with you and get more ideas of how that can focus and work, not just with K-12 kids, but it’s a human thing, right? We all want to feel like we belong and we all want to have someone who believes in us. And when we do, it’s amazing the things we can do. And the outcomes that we can have just in our own lives. So love hearing that story. And thank you for sharing that part as well too.
Rob Martin:
Yeah, no, it’s exciting. I’m glad to hear that that’s where the research is heading. It’s so exciting and so necessary because I think our children enter the high school, certainly feeling unheard. They feel left out of a lot of the things, they don’t identify with what their parents do or listen to and quite frankly, they learn technology in a very different way. So, being able to have them concentrate on that next step of how do I use this technology, that I know really well, to communicate with the people around you and to my own goals. That’s going to change things.
Mike Desparrois:
Adam, I feel like we could talk to Rob just for hours and hours and hours, because his voice is so easy to listen to. And he’s got so many great stories, but I do know we need to wrap up at some point in time. Do you have any more thoughts you’d like to share or ideas Rob or Adam, and I’ll be silent.
Adam Foldit:
I’m good. I enjoy listening to you as a teacher, listen to your class because you could have approached that situation and literally said, “This is what we’re doing for the next eight to 12 weeks deal with it.” Because I knew teachers that were that way. But you didn’t, you were like, “I don’t understand why you can’t do this quicker. And we can move on to something that you’re more interested in. And not only that, but you will continue to learn.” And I think that’s amazing.
Rob Martin:
The coolest part of that was… Oh, we got into week two or week three, and there was a special needs kid, he had lost two fingers. And he was struggling in a lot of different ways, he really was. And we came back and the class came back and said, “Everybody has meet these outcomes except for him, what do we do?” And I said, “What do you do? What are we going to do?” And they brainstormed for about half an hour and they came back and they said, “He can meet the outcomes if we let him text on his phone.” I was like, “Let’s try it. Let’s see what else.” And so he met the outcomes through texting, which was just incredible. And that was the student’s idea. If you give people space, they will do amazing things. And that’s just one of the great lessons that I learned through teaching, but then was really reinforced in the Our Community Listens facilitation training.
Mike Desparrois:
Yeah. That we don’t have to solve others’ problems. We just have to give them the space to allow them to solve their problems. Right? And it’s amazing what people can do. In probably a way better idea than what you would have came up with. Right?
Rob Martin:
Exactly. Well frankly, I was like, “Well, we got most of the class here.” But they solved the problem entirely which is great.
Mike Desparrois:
I love that. And I love how everybody then was included. And that’s really an education of what inclusion is all about, is let’s find ways to bring everybody around. So just awesome story.
Rob Martin:
When you facilitate a class, you see us pairing students together and they’re working together to solve whatever problem they might have brought to the course with them. And it’s a really great cycle that we do that with our students as well.
Adam Foldit:
Mike and Rob, thank you both for being on the podcast today, as always, we like to challenge our guests with a key takeaway for our listeners. Mike, I’ll let you off the hook unless you think you got something. But I’ll start with Rob. Rob, why don’t you give me your key takeaway here for our listeners.
Rob Martin:
In any podcast or any interview, it’s always tough to think about how do you wrap it all up. And for me, it comes back to a lot of the lessons that we use in the classroom. And when we facilitate OCL, you just have to come at it with a little bit of humility and give yourself and the other people around you the grace and space to really allow yourself to listen to the world around you and the people around you.
Adam Foldit:
Awesome. Thanks Rob, Mike?
Mike Desparrois:
For mine, Rob mentioned it several times and I think about this often, especially when I mess up with some of the skills, usually with my daughters, sometimes with my wife. It’s just the human connection part, right? And if you approach it from, “I want to connect with people and I really just want to value them.” And if we just listen, it’s amazing the connection that actually takes place and just the deepness of relationships that can actually happen as a result of just connecting with people rather than forcing our thoughts, ideas, judgments, opinions, all that stuff on others. So I appreciate you Rob, reminding me of that little piece today, and just appreciate having you on our call as well.
Rob Martin:
Thank you. Mike I appreciate being on the call and I appreciate all the great things that you’ve brought into it as well. I love our connection here and my new found friend of Adam is awesome too. I have another podcast nerd.
Adam Foldit:
That’s great. Well, thank you both for being on the podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation and I wish you both well as we continue to head into this uncharted territory of the 2020, 2021 school year.
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