Francis Egbuson

The old adage claims you can't teach old dogs new tricks, suggesting adults become rigid in their ways, resistant to change, and incapable of meaningful growth. I've felt this rigidity in myself—the resistance to change, the need to be right in every conversation. Yet my experiences as a father, husband, and business owner have revealed that this adage, like others before it ("there is nothing new under the sun"), often contradicts our lived reality and modern theories of adult learning. Adults continuously expand upon what they already know. As a facilitator, I understood my job involved creating conditions that enable learning. However, during a class on adult education, I discovered these conditions have a name: "holding environments." These environments provide the optimal balance of support and challenge—support by meeting learners where they are, accepting their current understanding, and challenge by gently pressing against those boundaries to foster ...

Over the past several days, I’ve been giving feedback to my colleagues through the Impact Learning platform—and in the process, I’ve come face-to-face with some uncomfortable truths. The first? I didn’t know some of my colleagues well enough to answer certain questions meaningfully. When asked to assess a colleague’s ability to manage stress or model habits of effectiveness, I struggled. But when prompted to describe a teammate in three to seven words, I felt more confident. This contrast got me thinking: how can we make the act of giving and receiving feedback more routine—something that’s woven into our daily interactions, rather than reserved for formal reviews? Redefining Feedback For this reflection, I define feedback as the regular practice of sharing observations about an individual’s performance—especially in relation to making and keeping high-quality commitments that affect team results. At its best, feedback happens in structured conversations that focus on three key areas: ...

At the Maman Coffee Shop in Union Market on a chilly Washington DC morning earlier today, a young man looking for a phone charger approached me. After someone else offered him a cable, he thanked me for offering to help. Then he asked, "Are you watching something interesting on your laptop?" I responded that I was doing schoolwork. He appeared stunned. "Are you still in school? Wow, you look like you have it all figured out by now." Laughing, I pointed to my fully white-bearded face and asked what made him say that. "Oh no, life is one continuous learning!" I replied. "True," he said as he walked away. This is about the second time I've had this experience. The first was during a conversation with an Uber driver who expressed shock that I was "still in school." These responses surprise me. I've never thought it was too late to learn anything, perhaps because I'm in the learning business, where we partner with individuals and...

I had the pleasure of meeting Zaccheus, one of the senior security officers at our hall of residence. Zaccheus was brought to the United States in 1980 from Liberia, during what he described as the end of “a time when Liberia was sweet.” His father, then a scholarship student, had sensed that this “sweetness” masked deep structural inequality in Liberian society, where about “two percent of the population controlled the wealth” of the nation. As prominent Liberian scholar Amos Sawyer would later document, the 1970s in Liberia were characterized by stark inequality and extensive corruption among the elite, creating a devastating divide between the ruling class and ordinary citizens. For Zaccheus’s father, who was studying in the United States on scholarship, the signs of impending crisis were unmistakable. Liberia — founded in 1822 as a colony by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to resettle free African Americans and freed slaves — seemed poised for upheaval. His intuition proved...

In this post, the interest will be on how do we create conditions that will facilitate online teaching in way that is authentic and formal. The input for this post will come from some of the readings for this week and my own experiences facilitating online.  According to Baran and Thompson (2013), four areas in which teachers experience a pedagogical transformation in an online environment were identified: (1) increasing structure and planning during course design (2) increasing organization in course management (3) increasing teacher presence for monitoring students' learning and (4) reconstructing student-teacher relationships. The role of the Teacher in teaching in general and in teaching online in particular stood out. The teacher, in the various roles (Facilitator, Manager, Coach, Designer, etc) has responsibility to ensure that learner engagement happens. And the ability of the teacher to create learner engagement will be determined by the teacher's philosophical orientat...

HOW  have you learned from your colleagues or mentor? How might you make use of Peer to Peer, PLN, or COP in the future?  One of the things I have learned from Adult Learning and Leadership program is the opportunity to learn from peers as much as one learns from the readings and professor. The collaborative nature of how new knowledge is created, shared and extended has been deep and enriching. It confirmed George Siemens assertion in one of the videos for this week, that learning happens in a socially connected way and that knowledge is produced in a networked way. This process of collaborative knowledge creation taps into, what Clay Shirky mentioned in his TED Talk, into human generosity and digital technology. The example of USHAHIDI - the online bulletin board created in 2008 as a response to the political violence on the streets of Kenya after the elections, reminded me of the use of WhatsAPP groups during the Nigeria presidential elections of 2023. Of note, it is the re...

We had the privilege to facilitate a learning session with members of the Uganda Private Educational Institution Association (NPEIA) held at St. Lawrence University last week. The session was attended by about 110 members from the various districts around Kampala, Wakiso and Luwero. This learning session was part of the multi year partnership between NPEIA and our firm CEMM. The objectives of the partnership are to enable NPEIA members achieve the learning and commercial objectives of the association, create process, content and faculty for on-going professional development for administrators, head teachers, teachers and other staff and provide access to Franklin Covey's whole school transformation process called The Leader In Me. CEMM is the exclusive licensee for Franklin Covey in Uganda, Rwanda, Togo and Burundi. As part of the interaction, we shared the following in response to NPEIA members interest: 1. Leaders who make a difference in peoples lives have a combination of Chara...