[Events] how to approach disengaged attendees

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

This varies a lot by individual, but generally our issue is that mentors
will not actively engage students - instead, they'll wait for a student to
raise a hand or otherwise ask for help.  This sometimes leads to students
working entirely on their own, then getting up and leaving.  My assumption
is that they're leaving because they're frustrated with the task, yet
feeling shy about asking for help, but of course I don't know that.  My own
experience is that as often as not students are happy to talk about
whatever problems they're having - they just didn't think it was worth
flagging somebody down to help them.  I would like to see this happen less.

We're changing the structure of our events so there's less opportunity for
this dynamic to emerge, but it would still be good to give mentors advice
on how to approach and engage.


On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Julien Dorra
<juliendorra at juliendorra.com>wrote:

>
> I'm writing up a guide for mentors at our events, and I want to include a
>> section on how to approach students that look
>> confused/frustrated/disengaged.  Surely these strategies have been written
>> about before!  Does anyone have suggestions of what to read and adapt for
>> our guide?
>>
>
> Are you looking for behaviors that make them comfortable when talking to
> them? Or ways to re-engage them as a whole? In term of strategies, it's
> both related to mentor behavior/language/inclusiveness and event-design
> (some event-design lead to disengagement or frustration more surely than
> others. Respectively lectures and follow-along-lessons come to mind as
> counter examples.).
>
> Could you give a specific example that you saw and that wouldn't want to
> see again?
>
> (confused/frustrated/disengaged participants is an issue that I fixed many
> times over the years in my classes and workshop, but context vary a lot, so
> some specifics might help me narrow down your issues.)
>
> Julien
>
>
>
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