About Alison McEachern, Kelly O'Neil and Groupatwork
Helping You Teach
About Alison McEachern, Kelly O'Neil and Groupatwork
Helping You Teach
About Groupatwork and Experiential Learning
You’re due for surgery tomorrow morning. Your surgeon graduated from medical school at the top of her class. She tells you not to worry. She has watched hundreds of hours of videos of surgery, so it makes no difference, she says, that she hasn’t actually operated on a body. You’re the first. Still want to go tomorrow?
Your surgeon may be brilliant, but she is lacking “real world” experience, and this has justifiably shaken your confidence. The world of learning is no different. People can sit and listen, or read, and sure, they’ll pick up something, but it won’t last. When they leave the venue, the content lasts for a brief time and then disappears like a smoke wisp. Real learning requires dirty hands. It’s when we shake off the passive approach and immerse ourselves in the learning experience that the roots take hold and students are able to learn and do something differently.
About Alison McEachern
Alison was forced to take piano lessons as a child. She hated it. But then she started teaching others how to play the piano and she discovered that she loved it - not the piano… she still hates the piano… but she loved teaching. By the time she finished her undergraduate degree she had a flourishing “piano school”, teaching people of all ages, and she knew that she wanted to teach.
In the summer of 1989, Alison’s teaching horizons broadened when she discovered experiential learning while attending St FX’s Diploma in Adult Ed Program, and the rest was history. So was the piano. She instantly knew what she wanted to do and it changed the course of her career. After completing her Masters of Education, Alison launched her own learning company, Groupatwork, in 1992 and joined the St FX facilitation team in 1995. In addition to her work with St FX, she has designed and delivered in-person and online experiential learning programs for universities, colleges, provincial and municipal governments, health care, non profit and private sector organizations across Canada and the United States.
Her interest in experiential learning extends to travel and the outdoors. Alison is certified in wilderness first aid and wilderness navigation…..fortunately she has never been lost or hurt.
Courses
Our Workshops
Courses
Our Workshops
Online Team Building (with a twist)
This is a fun one (not that our other courses aren’t fun🤓)… We’ve created a virtual team building exercise where you and your team mates have to overcome a series of challenges to unlock clues to a mystery and, in doing so, will learn aspects of participating, facilitating and operating in the online world… You’ll discover corners of Zoom and MS Teams that you never knew existed!
You’ll learn lots of useful tips and tricks if you’re lucky enough to get out of the internet alive! Since the whole operation is covert, you’ll have to contact us for more info.
Teaching Online
A workshop to help you design and deliver technical content in a way that helps your participants learn and use the content you’re teaching. You will be able to design learning activities, practice sessions, discussions that teach, lectures, handouts, visuals (including PowerPoint and other new technologies) to make your training engaging, efficient and effective.
Designing Presentations
Like Designing Workshops, this program will help you design your content in a way that makes it easy for your participants to learn and for you to deliver. You will be able to calculate how much information you can include, how to organise it in a way that helps participants remember it, design effective visual aids and reference materials and lead great discussions.
Teaching Tools
A workshop designed to help you use all of the tools you probably have access to already in new and useful ways. You’ll learn how to:
Use PowerPoint to create drag and drop exercises
Use Jamboard to recreate sticky notes
Use Microsoft to recreate flip charts in an online classroom
Use Microsoft to create great Pre and Post Quizzes
Find a way to recreate all of the things you miss from the physical classroom in the online world
Click on the button below to learn how to use Word docs as a pretty good substitute for flipcharts in your online classroom.