Enhance Your Colleagues’ Creativity through Selfless Listening

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This workshop will teach participants a disciplined form of listening that is designed to help a colleague elaborate and clarify ideas that may still be fuzzy in her mind.  The effort of explaining an idea and answering questions posed by the listener will push the client to figure out what she wants to say.  Unlike the more common method of brainstorming, selfless listening is an inherently asymmetric activity.  The listener must avoid offering advice or championing her own ideas.  The goal is to create a space of intellectual safety in which the client can develop her ideas without fear of criticism.

After an introduction to the concept of selfless listening, participants will practice the technique in pairs.  To get full benefit from this session, please think in advance about a scientific question or professional problem arising currently in your work that you are ready to discuss with your practice partner.  This might be related to your thesis topic, a paper you are planning to write, or a class project you need to think through.  There is no need to bring a partner with you to the workshop; you can practice successfully with someone you have not met before.
When: Monday, Oct 26th at 5pm
Where: Gunness Student Center, Marcus Hall
Register today!

Hannah Blau is finishing up her Ph.D. in the UMass College of Information and Computer Sciences.  Her dissertation is in educational technology and program analysis.  She developed software that gives automated feedback to advanced beginner programmers in college-level Java courses.
unnamed Hannah earned the B.A. in French Literature from Yale University and the M.S.E. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.  She worked in Louveciennes, France for four years as a software engineer at the Artificial Intelligence Center of the Bull Corporation, and for nine months in Ulm, Germany in the Machine Learning Group of the Daimler-Benz Research Centre.  From Germany she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota to join the Automated Reasoning Group at the Honeywell Technology Center as a research scientist.  She left Honeywell to enter the Ph.D. program at UMass.

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