From the introduction of:
The Teaching Moment:a learning metaphor by Mia Lobel, Michael Neubauer, Randy Swedburg

The Internet is saturated with distance education claims about learning environments, effective pedagogies, teaching modules, skill training techniques and community building models. Typing into Google: “online teaching training distance education” nets one 265,000 hits. Typically, efforts to deliver educational content and to construct knowledge online seem to be asynchronous. The synchronous teaching ‘engagements’, either attempt to incorporate high tech features like sound and/or video into their delivery method, while others seem to use Java based synchronous chat modules which only allow interacting in simple ASCII text. In general, one presumes that at least some portion of the teaching effectiveness claimed by this vast community of practitioners is predicated on long-term preparation, research, and experience. However, what this preparation may involve, on what specific data the opinions are based, or what the actual teaching really looks like, remains largely unclear.

“The Stone Soup” is an Eastern European folk tale. At the end of the war, a group of bedraggled soldiers come upon a devastated village. The inhabitants, having hidden the little bit of food they still had left, watched as one soldier made a fire, another fetched water in a cauldron, while another removed an ordinary looking stone from his pouch and placed it into the boiling water. Having accomplished this task, the soldiers settled around their campsite and began talking enthusiastically about their anticipated meal. The first soldier said: “Yes, stone soup is my favorite, but once I had it with cabbage, and that was delicious!” Hearing this, the bravest of the villagers, approached the cauldron and threw in his cabbage. The second soldier said: ”Ah, yes, but when you add a bit of beef, well…” Next, it was the village butcher who added a piece of meat he has been hoarding to the soup. Eventually, everyone sat down together to partake of the best soup the villagers have ever had. Before they left, the soldiers gave the magic stone to the villagers, reminding them that the stone’s power is actually in their cooperation.

Like in the children’s folk tale “The Stone Soup,” there seems to be a famine of empirical information about how learning actually takes place in the synchronous distance education village. Everyone seems to agree that knowledge is being delivered and the practitioners have found the delivery methods that serve them. The content of the knowledge being delivered is largely known, and often, grounded in theory. What seems to be missing is twofold: what are participants saying and how are they saying it? How is the learning task accomplished, and how are the group’s dynamics facilitated to allow the learning to unfold? This paper is an attempt to make transparent the process of experientially constructing knowledge in a real-time eClassroom, which has been described in Lobel, Neubauer, & Swedburg (2002).

The following account may be viewed as offering that which is invited: namely, other practitioners with whom to dialogue, and share the ingredients involved in creating the content and process of facilitating online real-time learning. The particular ‘teaching moment’ offered here seems apt in several ways. It demonstrates how people with different points of view, sharing their perspectives, can and do create a common pool of knowledge, where the lowest common denominator is raised to the highest one. The learning segment presented in this paper includes and makes visible the elements sought above: namely, the preparation, the research and the experience used to design, deliver and process a learning sequence. Like in the story, the Instructor provides a “stone” by posting a pictographic ambiguous image. As each villager brings her own unique contribution to the interaction, the resulting synergy-rich “soup” belongs to everyone. Could not any community, including one of teachers and learners, dialoguing in this manner produce the same result?

Essentially, teaching begins with the belief that “The way of the teacher is a practice in trust” (Arrien, 1998). The trust involved in this case study is supported by decades of observing the learning process, and is anchored by theories of learning and of group development to active practice and risky experimentation. “Trust the process” and “Be open to outcome,” accurately describe the value-base of the primary Instructor’s teaching approach. In keeping with “the Stone Soup” metaphor, the teacher brings the cauldron, builds the fire, puts the “magic” stone into the boiling water and trusts that eventually the audience will engage enough to bring their own hidden ingredients to the process.”

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This really makes me think about The Tao of Leadership because of the feminine, nurturing way that the soldiers show their leadership. This book is my ‘Leadership Bible’ that I go to time and again for inspiration and guidance. It really is ‘process’ oriented and focused on fostering leadership from within.

This Stone Soup metaphor fits well with my thinking around having students develop the curriculum around their interests, or more aptly, their tastes. Students as leaders and creators of content for learning, as opposed to just being passive receivers.