Panel Discussion: A Model for Initiative Development: Discussion and Ideas of Individual Spirit Harmonic

Abstract

"At the 2000 ABSEL Conference, Douglas L. Micklich and Gretchen Vik presented a paper on an exercise to develop initiative. They used as a basis an example from Barry Heerman’s “Building Team Spirit”, an exercise that focused on sharing, building, and clarifying individual goals. The exercise that was chosen considered the use of consonant and dissonant values or factors as ones that contributed to satisfying unmet goals and needs serving as the basis for initiative. Consonant values are those that bring harmony and foster initiative and dissonant values are those that bring disharmony and cause us to become discouraged from developing initiative. The main purpose of the panel discussion is to elicit ideas and discuss strategies used to help students develop initiative for solving problems and how to provide feedback to both students and instructors to improve their performance in developing and sustaining initiative. The main question that will be addressed by the panel is; What are some of the things that we do in designing activities that either encourage (reinforce consonance) or discourage (reinforce dissonance) one from taking initiative of some sort? "