Education Speaking Testimonials
Education Speaking Testimonials
Bowling Green State University
“It was absolutely wonderful to have you back at Bowling Green State University for a repeat performance. You have played a major role in this year’s Common Reading experience, visiting twice, and we are grateful to have benefited from your helpfulness, your insights, and your expertise. Thank you—on behalf of the Office of the Provost, the Common Reading Committee, and all of our students and faculty whose lives you have touched.”
The University of Oklahoma Price College of Business
“As Dean of the business school, I want to thank you for investing in such an important way in our students, faculty, advisors, and citizens here in Oklahoma. From all accounts, your two-day visit was a smashing success and I hope we have the chance to continue to work together in the time ahead. I hope you enjoyed your time in the Sooner State and appreciated how much we stand to benefit from many more Beautiful Questions.”
Berkshire School | Sheffield, MA
“THANK YOU for an exceptional presentation and workshop. Your research and message align so beautifully with Berkshire’s philosophy and aspirations, and our faculty raved about your presentation, as well as your approachable, “confident and humble style”! They also loved working collaboratively on the letter and identifying obstacles, as well as formulating our own beautiful questions. I will send you our “How might I…” questions for the website, and they really are pretty remarkable. I would love to stay in touch with you regarding next steps as we begin to break down and examine these beautiful questions.”
Dalton School in NYC
“Our Administrative Team read A More Beautiful Question this summer and has been meeting and dissecting and discussing it. We also gave it out to our entire faculty and staff for summer reading. So we were excited to bring you in to speak to our entire faculty and staff at our October Professional Development day. Conversations in the questioning exercises were excellent and continue. You inspired us.”
Nueva ILC Educators’ Day 2017 • Silicon Valley
“On behalf of the 2017 ILC Committee at Nueva, thank you for providing inspirational remarks at both our Hillsborough & Bay Meadows campuses on Educators’ Day. On that day, we know you motivated over 400 educators to bring back to their institutions the value of student inquiry and hopefully have inspired those teacher leaders and administrators to shepherd a new generation of “beautiful questioners” who will lead a new era of change!”
Los Angeles County Student Achievement Symposium
Feedback from symposium attendees (L.A. County teachers, school administrators)
“Great questioning protocol that I can easily implement at the district, state, and personal levels. I enjoyed going through the process which made it more concrete and applicable.”
“Fun, engaging, and thought provoking.”
“I appreciated learning more about the rationales behind encouraging the questioning process as being more valuable or at least as valuable as teaching our students to find solutions. I also appreciated being part of the process of brainstorming questions—instead of answers—and seeing how working our list of more than 10 questions into a sentence frame was a focused way to look for answers.”
“Great hands-on experience. Love the strategies shared.”
“It was so great to have Berger’s expertise and knowledge on the topic.”
“The presenter demonstrated a great way of guiding us through the “3 Questioning Exercises.” Allowing us to actively participate throughout this presentation was very meaningful.”
“Working through the process was amazing. I’m glad I stayed for the 2nd part!”
“Many ways to use with prevalent topics for PD at the district and state level. As much practice as I have had, this activity and learning hassupported me with an activity to empower more.”
“The content was simple in presentation but as the questions and conversation progressed, the issue was deep, meaningful, and complex.”
“Great process for initiating discussions!”
“Great tool for use with teams!!”
“This was a great takeaway presentation. Thank you!”
“Awesome!”
“Loved framing questions around a topic: Opening/closing the questions and forming and compounding the “how might we” questions.”
Nueva Education Conference in Silicon Valley, 2015
“One of the highlights for me this fall was your guest appearance in my DMBA class — made even better with the impromptu mashup with Robert — and The Nueva Conference were all incredibly impactful learning experiences for everyone involved —including me!
Below are some excerpts from my Innovation Studio students on what they took away from spending time with you. Many of them visualized their rich and reflective experience in their design journals — including the one attached below.”
Lisa Kay Solomon, Faculty, MBA in Design Strategy
Feedback from students:
Questioning brainstorming was one of my other favorite concepts during residency! An interesting life is full of questions. A boring life is full of answers. I believe in that! DMBA have made my life much more interesting as each day I have tones of question over different issues!
As I watched the TED-talk with Warren Berger I thought to myself… This is a really smart guy, I like the way he thinks about questions. I felt so encouraged to ask more questions, better questions, beautiful questions. And then I listened to him while he was on stage in my college – it was really great seeing him in person.
Questions! It was something I think about constantly; how many questions are too many questions? When does questioning begin? What is a good question? Should I ask this question?
Guess what, it’s all ok! Questions are great! Questions have led to some of the biggest and best design solutions of all time.
Mind blown! I LOVED all that we did and learnt! I’m so glad our residency kicks off with Innovation class!
Warren Berger’s Questionstorming session got me thinking about how we can have so many conversations just with Questions. After the obvious questions when we started racking our brains we came across such interesting questions and I will surely use this method of questioning to take forward a conversation.
This is a great practice and I have now ordered Warren Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question. I loved the discussion around it as well. As I have mentioned before, my son attends a Waldorf school and in Waldorf they encourage questioning, but they also encourage the parents to not always be the experts and just give closed answers, but instead co-create an answer.
I enjoyed going through Warren Berger’s questioning exercise. What was an individual activity in questioning, turned into a team activity and it allowed me to generate questions I may not have thought of previously. I’ve always been a big-time questioner but something clicked with me that I felt a new understanding of why the questions are so important. Insights are needed, not answers!
Both Warren Berger and Robert Poynten were great. I was already excited about them coming to class after listening to them at the ‘Mastering Ambiguity in Business’ event the night before. Thank
you Lisa for making it happen!The right kind of questioning made me question myself if may be that is the reason why most of the time I fail to find the right solution to my design needs.
Loved ‘Opening Closed Questions and Closing Open Questions.’ with Warren Berger
Now is time for questioning. “Asking” was, during my formational years, my strength and also my weakness. It is hard for others to accept questions and to get attracted to those that persistently inquiry about everything. I had a hard time in my high school and university years for that reason. Now I’m in the right place to feel that this “socially adverse questioning” is actually encouraged.
