Certainly some impressive achievements here and a lot that resonated with topics I’ve been thinking about, e.g. about the entrepreneurial attitude in EA movement building; I have an outline for a forum post specifically on that topic but not sure if I’ll get round to writing it up.
<<As for the importance of personalized programming—when Stanford EA first ran our fellowship, we ran one big section of 15-20 fellows in one big weekly discussion…
I then decided to switch our model to 2:1 to 5:1 (fellow:organizer) small groups (largely depending on capacity as I’ve had the most success with 3:1 groups so far). This increased attendance, reading completion and engagement, the ability to personally address questions, criticisms, and key takeaways from the material, and also led to fellows befriending organizers.>>
I would love to know any more detail about this that you’re happy to share, especially on attendance + retention as the fellowship progressed.
I would intuitively feel worried about setting up such small support groups; if one person drops out of your support groups, I would imagine it would be pretty demoralising for the remaining 1/2/3/4 people, because it would feel like such a big chunk of the group dropping out at once. The effect on perceived social norms / value would presumably be quite high. And do you ever end up with very small groups, or whole support groups disbanding?
Id also be intrigued to know if you have problems with people falling behind on reading / prep before their scheduled meeting times? In Animal Advocacy Careers’ online course, the completion rates were higher than I had worried they might be, but we had quite a few people who fell behind on the weekly deadlines and then rushed through the content in a short space of time. (I don’t mean they didn’t pay attention to it, but cramming it in is likely worse for remembering the content; perhaps also worse for reflection + implementation, though that’s just a hunch.)
Certainly some impressive achievements here and a lot that resonated with topics I’ve been thinking about, e.g. about the entrepreneurial attitude in EA movement building; I have an outline for a forum post specifically on that topic but not sure if I’ll get round to writing it up.
<<As for the importance of personalized programming—when Stanford EA first ran our fellowship, we ran one big section of 15-20 fellows in one big weekly discussion… I then decided to switch our model to 2:1 to 5:1 (fellow:organizer) small groups (largely depending on capacity as I’ve had the most success with 3:1 groups so far). This increased attendance, reading completion and engagement, the ability to personally address questions, criticisms, and key takeaways from the material, and also led to fellows befriending organizers.>> I would love to know any more detail about this that you’re happy to share, especially on attendance + retention as the fellowship progressed.
I would intuitively feel worried about setting up such small support groups; if one person drops out of your support groups, I would imagine it would be pretty demoralising for the remaining 1/2/3/4 people, because it would feel like such a big chunk of the group dropping out at once. The effect on perceived social norms / value would presumably be quite high. And do you ever end up with very small groups, or whole support groups disbanding?
Id also be intrigued to know if you have problems with people falling behind on reading / prep before their scheduled meeting times? In Animal Advocacy Careers’ online course, the completion rates were higher than I had worried they might be, but we had quite a few people who fell behind on the weekly deadlines and then rushed through the content in a short space of time. (I don’t mean they didn’t pay attention to it, but cramming it in is likely worse for remembering the content; perhaps also worse for reflection + implementation, though that’s just a hunch.)