Stories

Tag: Dialogue

  • Can Teach to Reach help your organization?

    Can Teach to Reach help your organization?

    Teach to Reach stands as a unique nexus in the global health landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities for diverse stakeholders to engage, learn, and drive meaningful change.

    With over 60,000 participants from more than 90 countries, this platform, network, and community bring together a mix of frontline health workers, policymakers, and key decision-makers.

    At Teach to Reach, research institutions and academic researchers engage health workers to translate their findings into policy and practice

    For research institutions and academic partners, Teach to Reach provides a site for knowledge translation.

    It provides direct access to practitioners and policymakers at all levels, enabling researchers to share findings with those best positioned to apply them in real-world settings.

    The platform’s interactive features, such as “Teach to Reach Questions,” allow for rapid data collection and feedback, helping bridge the gap between research and practice.

    At Teach to Reach, global agencies can listen and learn with local communities

    Global health organizations can leverage Teach to Reach to gain invaluable insights into unmet needs of local communities.

    With half of the participants working in districts and local facilities, and many in challenging contexts such as armed conflict zones (1 in 5) or remote rural areas (>60%), partners can engage with ground-level perspectives that inform development, strategies, and programme design.

    This direct engagement with frontline workers offers a unique window into the realities of diverse health systems.

    At Teach to Global, global actors help elevate the voices and leadership of local actors

    For those looking to make a tangible impact on global health equity, Teach to Reach’s scholarship programme offers a compelling opportunity.

    Scholarship sponsors support health workers from low and middle-income countries to participate in Teach to Reach.

    This investment not only builds individual capacity but strengthens health systems by recognizing and amplifying health worker voices and expertise.

    Facilitate meaningful dialogue on critical issues

    Global health stakeholders find in Teach to Reach a platform that facilitates meaningful dialogue on critical issues.

    The diverse participant base, including national policymakers and heads of national programmes, creates an environment ripe for new kinds of inclusive dialogue that can shape national and global strategies and frameworks.

    Become a Teach to Reach sponsor

    This mix of participants offers partners a unique opportunity to engage with key decision-makers in an interactive, collaborative setting.

    Some partners also become sponsors by contributing to the costs.

    For example, partners can sponsor scholarships for health workers to support their participation in Teach to Reach.

    This is just one of the ways in which partners can help sustain Teach to Reach as a platform, network, and community.

    For private sector organizations, sponsoring Teach to Reach aligns seamlessly with corporate social responsibility goals in global health.

    By this platform, organizations can articulate their concrete commitment to strengthening health systems, showing their support to health workers, and promoting health equity.

    This engagement goes beyond traditional philanthropy, offering sponsors a way to showcase their dedication to improving global health outcomes while enhancing their reputation in the field.

    In essence, Teach to Reach offers a multifaceted value proposition for partners.

    It is a place to listen and learn, to share and collaborate, to influence and be influenced.

    Whether an organization’s goals revolve around research impact, market insights, policy influence, or social responsibility, Teach to Reach provides a unique, efficient, and impactful site to engage.

    By joining this community, partners do not just support a platform – they become part of a movement that is reshaping how we approach global health challenges, one connection at a time.

  • Listening for leadership

    Listening for leadership

    On 30 May 2021, Convenors Karen Watkins and Reda Sadki were joined by eight Key Contributors: Nancy Dixon, Bryan Hopkins, Barbara Moser-Mercer, Renee Rogers, Catherine Russ, Esther Wojcicki, Laura Bierema, and Emanuele Capobianco.

    This was the third Dialogue convened by The Geneva Learning Foundation for learning, leadership, and impact.

    Each Key Contributor has a fascinating, singular leadership journey. This trajectory may have a collective dimension, of movements, of belonging, or of affiliation that have and continue to shape it. Even when this is so, it is also profoundly personal and individual. It is also a process of accretion – although we tend to recall quantum leaps in significant learning. For some, there may be discomfort with calling oneself a ‘leader’, given the conflation between leadership and authority, leadership and management, leadership and perceived value in society.

    Then, there is the moment of coming to consciousness, about the significance of leadership.

    So we started there, by asking:

    • How do you define the notion of leadership in this Digital Age? How is it different from notions of leadership in the past?
    • When and how did you realize the significance of the leadership question in your work and life? Who or what helped you come to consciousness?
    • What difference did it make to have this new consciousness about the importance of leadership?
      What is your own leadership practice now?
    • How do you define your leadership in relationship to learning? Are you a ‘learning leader’ and, if so, what does that mean?

    We are privileged to have a number of Key Contributors who have dedicated their life’s work to the study of leadership and learning. We are interested in their leadership journeys, of course, but we will also turn to them to ask:

    • What do you hear, as you listen to these stories?
    • What can you share from your work on leadership to better understand the journeys being shared?

    And, really, we want to know: How do you listen to people sharing their experience of leadership? What should we be listening for in order to unravel what goes into – and can come out of – leadership?

    You can listen to the Dialogue here.

  • Now is not everything

    Now is not everything

    “Everything is now. Knowledge flows in real time. Global conversations are no longer restricted by physical space. The world has become immediate.” – George Siemens in Knowing Knowledge (2006)

    Twenty Key Contributors have now joined the Geneva Learning Foundation’s monthly Dialogue on learning, leadership, and impact. They include: Laura Bierema, Emanuele Copabianco, Nancy Dixon, Katiuscia Fara, Bill Gardner, Keith Hampson, Bryan Hopkins, Iris Isip-Tan, Barbara Moser-Mercer, Aliki Nicolaides, Renee Rogers, Alan Todd, Bill Wiggenhorn, Esther Wojcicki, and Chizoba Wonodi. If you are curious, a few quick Google searches should make obvious two points: First, each one is a singular thinker and leader. Second, with a few exceptions, they might otherwise never meet.

    Why do we need such a dialogue? Who is it for? And what do we aim to accomplish?

    By learning, we mean the process by which humans come to know, organized into the discipline of education. The science of education, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis have asserted, “develops knowledge about the processes of coming to know”, making education “privileged to be the science of sciences.”

    Our mission at the Foundation is to discover new ways to tackle the threats to our societies. Our conviction is that education as a philosophy for change provides uniquely fertile ground in the Digital Age for exploration, once disciplinary guardrails and institutional blinders are removed.

    “What if”, ponders Aliki Nicolaides, whose work explores learning-within-ambiguity, “learning was the way of an ethical life where the interdependence between individual and societal evolution was embraced and structures reflected an ethic of mutual care, human, non-human, and nature?”

    It is easy to get lost in our complex world. The immediacy of the world only heightens the need for reflective practice.

    For Renee Rogers, whose coaching practice seeks to “create positive change around challenging issues”, we need a dialogue on “healing collective trauma” to “foster human evolution”.

    This dialogue does not have to be abstract, convoluted, or complicated. As Esther Wojcicki, a remarkable Silicon Valley high school teacher, journalist, and author of both Moonshots in Education and How to Raise Successful People, says “simple lessons” can lead to “radical results.”

    Why does the Foundation consider leadership to be central in relation to learning?

    Leadership is about sense-making to navigate both the known and the unknown. “Leadership is as much of an art”, argued Robert G. Lord and Jessica E. Dinh in 2014, “as it is a role that has significant impact on individuals, groups, organizations, and societies.”

    I realized the significance of leadership through engagement with the profound research and writing of Catherine Russ on humanitarian leadership and the professionalization of humanitarian work. This coming to consciousness about the significance of leadership is, in my view, indispensable to transforming theories of change into effective practice.

    Can we answer the question of “how to lead” – the prevailing obsession of thousands of business books – before we comprehend how we know what we know about leadership? (Of course, if we do not yet recognize the significance of leadership or reduce it to a “soft skill”, we do not even realize how much both of these questions matter.)

    In our inaugural Dialogue on 28 March 2021, my co-founder Karen E. Watkins explained her “belief that, if you create a certain openness in an organizational culture, people are much more likely to see themselves as leaders”. That belief is grounded in a lifetime of visionary dedication to the study of learning culture, leadership, and change.

    Alan Todd is a pioneer of digital learning for multinational corporations. There, “change” means, at the very least, a restructuring every seven months. Eight years ago, he wrote that “as leadership talent – and talent in general – become the predominant asset of business, value shifts to the firm’s know-how.”

    By impact, we are primarily interested in the creation of value in global development, health, and humanitarian response. It could be said to be shorthand for radical results. (Value and results may mean different things in profit-driven industries – but they all depend on the peculiar industry dedicated to ensuring that there remains a world where we can buy and sell things.)

    Against the present and future threats that loom over our societies, we start with those of concern to the Dialogue’s known circle conveners and contributors. Then – and this is where we positively deviate from the norm of expert panels – we intersect these concerns with the challenges, insights, and successes shared by participants who may, initially, be complete strangers to us and to each other.

    Our focus on impact saves the Dialogue from descending into the rabbit hole of purely abstract discussion. 

    For example, education as social structure has proven incredibly resistant to change. This is a significant threat, as the gap grows between the needs of our societies and what schools and universities are able to provide. Our exploration will certainly be both broad and deep here, spanning from new economic models for education to new ways of thinking and doing for learning practitioners. 

    Higher education analyst Keith Hampson has submitted this question for the Dialogue: “To what extent will alternative education providers (i.e. not colleges and universities) establish legitimacy? Will the soft monopoly held by colleges and universities inhibit the development of new forms of digital education and new digital education providers?”

    Bill Gardner, a seasoned executive leadership coach, wonders: “How do we as learning facilitators speed up time-to-capability without sacrificing quality and effectiveness?”

    What if you do not fit into any of the historical categories of teacher, professor, coach, trainer, or instructional designer? Key to the Dialogue is the recognition that the lens of education needs to expand to include other professions that increasingly recognize the centrality of how we come to know.

    Image: Detail of a sculpture found in the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyère, Switzerland. Personal collection.