Reflections on being part of the Learning 2 Africa Organising Committee

Being asked by John Iglar to be part of the Learning 2.014 Africa Organising Committee about a year ago, after it was announced in Singapore, has been both an honour and a curiosity to me. My immediate response to him at the time was "you know that I am not in the Africa region" to which he replied "I know, and I still want you to help with putting the conference together." Now that the first ever Learning2Africa is complete, we could talk a little more about the process and how he had to defend his decision to include me on the committee with both his own staff and the Learning 2 Advisory.  Which is fair enough, as I pointed that out from the beginning. John later told me that he wanted my enthusiasm and experience with Learning2Asia to set up the conference in Addis Ababa, as only a few others on the committee have been to an L2 conference before.

Working on the conference from afar was not a problem at all. Sometimes the Skype on GHangouts connections would get dropped during our weekly meetings, but other than that, everything was communicated asynchronously through email and shared GDocs. I suggested that I work on the Cohorts, Cohort Facilitators and Workshops remotely and to keep John and the committee in the loop as things progressed. 

As the cohort set up with Learning 2 conferences is so unique and important to the success of the conference, I decided to take my own approach to setting up the cohorts. My plan from the start was to align good leaders with each cohort, to have an innovative and effective leader embedded in each cohort. With this goal in mind, started contacting people at I know who would make good cohort facilitators who are either in the region, or nearby and who might want to come take part. This proved to be a really successful approach as it served to pre-advertise the conference, and provided the selected people with a little more leverage with their schools in order to attend the conference in a leadership role. I was only able to pre-select about half of the facilitators roles in the end, but this gave us a good base of people in these important roles. It also encouraged these schools to send more faculty to this new, unknown conference.

As the conference neared, some other advancements that I wanted to introduce into the process included:

• provide each cohort facilitator with a list of the members, schools they are coming from, and their roles/positions there
• having the cohort facilitators contact their cohort members in advance to front-load them with information to connect them and to start the networking process
• have the cohorts start thinking about their own "burning questions" , big take-aways and goals for attending the conference
• build in an orientation meeting for all of the facilitators prior to the conference opening, to form them into a team and to come to a common understanding of the philosophy of Learning 2 (which is new to most of the conference participants)
• daily check-in meetings with the facilitators to set them up for the cohort sessions later that day)
• daily debrief meetings with the facilitators to see how their cohort sessions went and to gather feedback from the cohorts; interestingly, these immediately became joint Learning 2 Leaders and Cohort Facilitators debriefs 

#baboon - Other than #Learning2 and #buses, #baboon was a trending hashtag during the conference (but we never did have a school baboon alarm)

As the conference got underway, the Learning 2 Leaders were asked to attach themselves to a cohort of their choice which was wonderful. Not only did the Cohort Facilitators enjoy having the Leaders present and participating in their cohorts, but the Leaders really connected with the participants through the cohorts. In the debrief meetings, the feedback that came out of the cohorts was inspiring and exhilarating - participants were connecting, sharing, collaborating and networking which are all the main goals of the conference and what distinguishes Learning 2 from other conferences (which have typical job-alike meetings). The best feedback came out of the second cohort session where each group is cussed their "burning questions" using a simple protocol based on the Final Word - Critical Friends. Having the chance to discuss issues, problems of practice, challenges and open "how to" questions with a group of peers in a non-threatening/judgemental environment (through the protocol) was fulfilling, enlightening and productive. Many of the Cohort Facilitators came away from that session raving about their group and how they really came together as a team. At the end of the conference, some were talking about how they would like to continue having cohort meetings online every day - surely this is the best possible outcome for the conference which is all about sharing and collaboration, especially beyond the conference.

To me, the cohort experience has been the most important part of the Learning 2 Asia conferences that I've attended. To bring this experience and connection to Africa for the first time is very satisfying and fulfilling for me. To take this another step or two forward, I have now been tasked by the Learning 2 Advisory to collaborate with L2Bangkok to help organize their cohorts, embed my additions to the process for setting up the cohorts, and to rewrite the "playbook" for future L2 conferences. And to take my own participation in Learning 2 a step further - I will be facilitating the Curriculum Leaders cohort at L2Asia in Bangkok.