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Marianne O’Quinn was vice principal at Rorimer Elementary School when she told this story. She is currently a learning director at Rorimer.

Working with Ball has made a tremendous change in how I work with people. I love working with people, but it’s always been more directed. Ball has taught me new techniques so that I now work with people in a more collaborative mode. It’s amazing to see how a simple change can trickle down. I’ve seen it happen and it’s great. It seems like such a short time ago that we started with all this, and yet, I’ve seen the process of Ball trickle all the way down through me, through my teachers, through my parents, and show up in the classrooms already.

When I was experiencing some of the Ball training, I kept thinking, “When are we ever going to get to the meat of it?” And I didn’t realize – I was in the meat of it. I was learning and experiencing. It’s an amazing process.

One of my favorite techniques was the World Café because I was able to take it back to my school site right away and use it with my parents. We sent out flyers that said, “Come be a part of Rorimer’s Royal Café.” We called it that because we are the Royals and our school symbol is a crown.

It wasn’t just parents who came. Actual community members who don’t have children at the school came. Some of them were there because they’re involved in our English tutoring class. So we had parents and community members and different cultures. We have a large Hispanic community, and they are wonderful. At first, I was a little iffy about presenting the World Café to them, but when I explained the history of the Café with Cesar Chavez, they were really interested.

So they were all seated at their round tables, and they had their markers and paper to write down their ideas. We had an Asian culture group at one table, and a Hispanic group, and then we mixed everyone up. They discussed what they wanted to work on as a parent community for the school year. Then we took those ideas from the Café to plan our monthly parent meetings.

My principal and I have used the World Café a lot to formulate discussion and collaboration on different issues in our staff meetings. It’s a positive way to get positive conversation going to reach a goal. Somehow, almost like magic, negativity is kept out of the process. I think that’s because when people come together in a Café, they sit with different people than they normally would. So they focus more on what we need to do as a community, rather than talking about what they’re not happy with – which would be easy for them to do if they were sitting with people they knew. It allows more freedom and keeps it positive. Also, we’ve learned through Ball to really try to phrase the questions so that we can move more positively towards the goal.

I’ve noticed a difference with the parent groups. There’s more communication, more participation and willingness to give ideas. There’s more follow- through on ideas they may have had, but were afraid to voice or ask for help. They’re now more willing to see that when you talk with other people, you can connect. They’ve found out about resources that are available to them that they were not aware of before just by talking with different people that they had never met. It’s amazing what people can do when they put their brains together and reach for a common goal.

Word cloud created at wordle.net.