Have you seen the article about Read My Mind in this issue? Here is how you can modify that LOLA for your own needs.
The purpose of Read My Mind is to encourage the participants to generate alternative responses to an open question. By tapping into the previous experience and expertise of the participants, this LOLA provides a creative opener for your own virtual classroom topics.
Sample Topics
Here are some examples of training topics for this LOLA, each with a suitable open question:
- Change Management: How do employees react to frequent changes in the workplace?
- Feedback: How can we effectively use the feedback we receive?
- Gamification: In what business areas can we use gamification?
- Facilitation: What are the characteristics of an effective facilitator?
- Critical Thinking: How would you examine the claim that vaccinations result in autism?
- Listening Skills: What is one important ground rule for effective listening?
- Coaching: How do we coach an employee who is habitually late?
- Presentation skills: What are different purposes of making a presentation?
The secret of designing an effective Read My Mind LOLA is to come up with an open question that can elicit a number of valid responses.
The Structure of This LOLA
You can write up the instructions for your activity by using our earlier writeup as a model. All you need to do is replace all references to our topic (trust) with your own topic.
If you are interested in tweaking the activity to better suit your needs and constraints, here is the Read My Mind game plan that shows the framework:
| Step | What the facilitator does | What the participants do |
|---|---|---|
| Prepare an open question. | Come up with a question that can elicit a number of valid responses. | |
| Prepare alternative responses. | Make a list of three to seven alternative responses to the open question. Base these responses on a review of the literature and interviews with experts. | |
| Prepare slides. | Prepare a set of slides with the question, responses, and instructions for the activity. Upload these slides for use in your webinar. | |
| Present the question. | Display the slide with the open question. | Read the question. |
| Explain the task. | Challenge the participants to guess the list of responses on the next slide. | Type guesses in the chat box. |
| Monitor the responses. | Comment on the responses typed by the participants. Encourage more responses and different types of responses. | Continue typing their guesses. |
| Present your list. | Display the slide with your list of responses. | Review the responses. |
| Discuss one response at a time. | Ask the participants to comment whether or not they guessed this response. | Type their comment about each response. |
| Discuss novel guesses. | Ask the participants to comment on any guess that was not included in your list. | Type their comments. |
| Conclude the activity. | Thank participants and move to the rest of the webinar. |