Extension staff often ask, "Isn't there an informal yet structured way to get feedback at a conference without using a survey?" One technique is to create "Listening Posts," a selected group of conference participants who agree to post themselves in the corridors and break rooms at a conference to record on a clipboard what the other participants tell them about the conference as it unfolds.

In the conference's introduction, the chair discusses the evaluation and 1-2 questions related to the conference goals, for example: "We want to know two things: What did you think of the idea of bringing Extension and research together at this conference? What is one idea or suggestion that you found useful for your professional work? Then, tell us anything else about the conference you feel is important for us to know. We asked 12 registered participants to circulate in the halls outside the meeting rooms and record your ideas. These Listening Posts have a blue badge and clipboard. You can't miss them.

"We asked participants, people like yourself, instead of the conference planners, to be the Listening Posts so you'll have no reluctance in talking about your experience at the conference. After you give your ideas to a Listening Post, you receive a sticker with 'Someone Listened to Me' printed on it. Put the sticker on your conference badge to show others you have contributed to the evaluation. The sticker will remind others to participate. After the conference, the feedback will be summarized for planning future programs."

Array of Participants

Listening Posts insure feedback from many participants and especially from participants who tend to leave early, don't like surveys, and have low reading skill or language problems.

Quality Data

Typically, at the end of a conference when evaluations are often circulated, participants' minds are numb, making it hard to remember one session from another, never mind what was learned. Giving participants a chance to talk to Listening Posts throughout the conference enhances the validity of data.

Oriented to the Client's Perspective

Listening Posts provide conference planners with rich, qualitative insights about all aspects of the conference. They learn what's important to the participants.

Program Ownership

You can build ownership in the program by selecting leaders or important people from your target audience to be Listening Posts. Their participation should increase their interest and concern in the long-term success of the program.

User Friendly

This evaluation strategy puts little response burden on participants. Indeed it can be fun for both participants and Listening Posts. Experience shows in one state that the strategy gets repeated at other conferences due to popular demand.

Shy Persons

Participants who are extremely reluctant to talk may not contribute. Work to overcome this possibility in the opening conference remarks by mentioning the need for everyone to contribute their positive and negative feelings at least once.

Selected Information

Participants will reveal some things they learned or found confusing, but obviously they can't discuss everything. Participants will tend to comment on what is most salient to them.

First, because participants in this technique are invited to contribute, the percentage of participants who give their reactions will be far greater than those who would normally react in an ad hoc fashion. Research has shown that many people participate if asked, but are reluctant otherwise.

Second, participants will feel more free to comment because someone other than a planning committee member is recording their reactions. Participants are often reluctant to give criticism directly to people on a planning committee.

Have a program committee decide on a schedule for the Listening Posts, who to ask to volunteer, and where to meet at the conference. Training is then done to ensure reliability within and across volunteers regarding two points: (a) Listening Posts are true to their name; they listen, record participants' views but never react to what they hear and (b) except to repeat the broad questions outlined in the conference introduction if requested, Listening Posts do not ask questions.

Have the committee call the Listening Posts in plenty of time and send them a conference agenda so they can review ahead of time, when and where they will circulate at the Conference.

Statistically, one out of two marriages in this country ends in divorce. One million children each year will be children of divorce. Some researchers suggest that approximately 20-to-25% of children in divorced and remarried families display problems of adjustment as compared to 10% in nondivorced families (Hetherington, Bridges, and Insabella, 1998). For example, children of divorce are at risk for higher anxiety levels, a variety of emotional and educational problems, and possibly depression and suicide.

Why would parents who are divorcing, seeking a dissolution (Ohio's version of marriage termination by agreement), or filing for custody changes need to attend a parent education program called "Helping Children Cope with Divorce?" Aren't these good parents? Don't they care about their children? The answer is yes.

Yes, they are good parents. Yes, they do care about their children. The problem is, as one local Common Pleas judge stated, "In many cases, I was dealing with fairly decent parents who were not acting very decently......" The judge often found himself embroiled in squabbles between parents over their children.

In response to this concern, Ohio State University Extension and Noble Behavioral Health Choices, Inc., a local counseling agency, together with the court developed and implemented a program to educate parents about the harm they can inflict upon their children in a divorce situation. The program has since expanded to a neighboring county. Both "Helping Children Cope with Divorce" programs are now mandated by local Court of Common Pleas judges in the two rural, southeastern Ohio counties.In one county, the program is team-taught by the Family and Consumer Sciences Extension professional and a counseling professional. In the other county, the program is led by FCS and 4-H Youth Development Extension professionals. Parents with children under 18 who are filing for divorce, dissolution, or custody modifications are the target audience.

The two-hour "Helping Children Cope with Divorce" program consists of various educational methods focusing primarily on the children and how to prevent alienation. However, since this can be a very emotional time for everyone, especially parents, the program also educates adults regarding their own emotional state during this chaotic transitional period. For instance, the stages of grief are presented to illustrate that when a divorce or dissolution occurs, those involved often feel a sense of loss. It takes an average of two to four years for individuals to reach the acceptance stage of the change.

In addition, some common reactions children have to their parents divorce are presented in relationship to their specific age group. Regardless of age, it appears most children feel a sense of loss, divided loyalties, and self-blame for the divorce. Harmful games that parents and children play are also discussed in the program plus ways to avoid these destructive behaviors.

Finally, participants are given helpful hints about what they might tell children regarding the divorce or dissolution.For example, parents might stress that the children did not cause the change; that they will be able to continue to love both parents; and the special connection between parent and child will live on forever. Other topics presented include post-divorce parenting tips and living in a blended/step family environment. Educators interested in establishing a similar program can obtain the teaching outline and handouts from the authors.

Since January 1997 the program has been evaluated by 336 participants from Noble and Monroe Counties using an exit survey. The questions focus on program content, aspirations to apply program content, perception of their children's adjustment to the divorce, and demographics. The format includes Likert-type scales, multiple choice, demographic, and open-ended questions.

Participants were asked to name one thing they could do to keep children out of the middle of parental disagreements. Some responses included: "Have disagreements in private away from children," "Don't use the child as a weapon," "Do not talk negatively about the other parent," "Don't relay messages through your children," and "Be positive."

On a five-point Likert-type scale, participants were asked to rate how well their children were adjusting to the changes in the family. Evaluation results revealed that 56% of the parents indicated that they think their children are adjusting okay, not too well or not well at all to the divorce. Whereas 44% reportedtheir children were adjusting very well or well.

When asked what children need to hear about the divorce, 90% of the respondents correctly answered a multiple choice question. Ninety-two percent also agreed or strongly agreed that children can make a healthy adjustment after the divorce.

On a five-point scale, 85% of the parents agreed or strongly agreed that the program would be beneficial in helping them assist children with adjustment to the divorce.Seventy-two percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the program would make a difference in how they communicate with a former spouse.

Participants indicated they were married an average of 10.1 years. Also, 79% of the parents responded that this was their first divorce and 21% indicated they were divorced two or more times. Sixty-seven percent of the participants stated that their own parents were not divorced. The mean age of participants was 33.1 years.

Experience conducting this program has resulted in several adaptations to the program delivery.Specific issues that should be addressed prior to implementing a similar program include: (a) establishing policies with the local court for pre-registration, late arrival, payment, and availability of child care; (b) establishing a policy about whether or not couples should attend together and handling restraining orders that may be in effect for a parent; (c) determining the need for on-site law enforcement presence and discussing methods for managing behavioral conflict;(d) establishing guidelines for referrals to the court when parents question the need to participate or pay registration fees; and (e) determining whether or not friends or family members of participants may attend.

In addition several basic concerns should be discussed with cooperating judges. Those include: (a) who should participate (those seeking divorce, dissolution and custody modifications); (b) length of program and how often to repeat it; (c) reasonable participant fees based on printing costs for handouts, room rental, audio-visual expense, and refreshments; (d) which agency should receive partial or total registration fees when there is more than one sponsoring agency; (e) literacy level of participants; and (f) instructor qualifications.

Parents preoccupied with emotions often unknowingly neglect the needs of their children. This program encourages parents to think about how their actions and words may impact children. The main emphasis of the program is to encourage parents to talk to their children and avoid putting children in the crossfire. Based on requests for information about implementing a divorce education program for parents, the need for this type of parent education is becoming more prominent across the country.

Hetherington, E. M., Bridges, M., & Insabella, G. M. (1998). What matters? What does not? - Five perspectives on the association between marital transitions and children's adjustment. American Psychologist, 53, 167-184.

As distance education continues to emerge as an alternative for delivering formal education, barriers affecting student-professor communication come into focus. These barriers confront distance educators with a variety of communication problems directly affecting the teaching/learning process. One barrier affects an essential component of the distance education process. That barrier is the submission of student homework coupled with the professor providing timely feedback to the student.

This article explores how one distance education program, at the University of Wyoming, has maximized the use of electronic mail for exchanging information between professors and students scattered throughout the distance education environment. Specifically, this article will (a) discuss issues that face distance educators when using electronic mail for exchanging course materials, (b) share possible solutions for effective student homework submission and professor feedback, and (c) recommend a practical system for exchanging written student-professor communication.

Over the past few years, a cohort of students has been participating in a doctoral program via distance education through the University of Wyoming. Students are geographically distributed across a 500 mile segment of Utah and southern Wyoming. The professors are on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, 400 miles from the nearest student. An essential component to this program is the communication pathways developed between the faculty and students. These pathways have replaced the traditional professor-student classroom interaction in a variety of ways.

As with many distance education programs, assignments are distributed to students and returned to campus via a facsimile machine or traditional postal methods. The resulting long delays without feedback and the costly FAX and mail charges are frustrating to both professors and students. From the onset of the program, both students and professors have willingly experimented with electronic mail as a cost and time effective alternative for exchanging class materials. Some of these experiments, using electronic mail for submission of homework, have created even greater frustrations due to anomalies in technology.

Many problems surfaced in the Wyoming program as students and professors used electronic mail for exchanging materials. Not all students and professors had the skills or computer equipment necessary to exchange homework electronically. When the skills and equipment were available, students and professors used a variety of computer programs for e-mail and word processing that were often not compatible. This incompatibility meant the students could not read the professor's materials and vice-versa. These technical frustrations, individually or in combination, distracted from the learning process and at times thwarted the learning process.

Experience in higher education reveals positive correlation between professor-student interaction and academic achievement. The ease of accessibility to computer and Internet technology, for all distance education participants, offers a cost effective and time-effective solution to the challenge of providing professor feedback to students. The University of Wyoming cohort recognized the importance of professor-student interaction, which in turn led to a search for an effective solution to this communication challenge.

In the University of Wyoming program, the frustration of not receiving timely feedback initiated many experiments designed to resolve this issue. Several of the experimental solutions are described below. These ideas can serve as possible solutions for similar problems in other programs.

One solution requiring a standard computer hardware and software platform was considered. This requirement in distance education courses can be easily paralleled to a traditional classroom course where the teacher requires students to buy and use specific books. Yet, the expense of a standard computer platform can be tremendous and therefore was not deemed the most appropriate solution.

A second solution requiring a computer orientation class for all students and faculty in the distance education program was evaluated. This solution, like the first, can be easily negated on cost of orientation development and orientation standardization. One specific orientation program would be difficult to implement due to the variety of computer systems available to participants.

A third solution that mandated a common software protocol was implemented and assessed. The ASCII standard computer format is universal to most personal computer systems and allowed electronic communication among all the students and professors. Yet, after implementing this minimal standard it was found that the formatting limitations of the ASCII standard drastically affected the print quality of course materials. Therefore, simple assignments that required mandatory formatting (such as APA style) were not possible. After implementation and trial, this solution was deemed unacceptable.

A successful solution to this problem arose from experimentation by various students and faculty. A statistics professor, who needed to use special characters in his handouts, suggested the use of the Adobe PDF (portable document format) computer file format. PDF files are commonly used in business to share print quality information via the Internet. The software program to view and print PDF files is free via the Internet. The computer program, Adobe Acrobat, that creates the PDF files from any computer platform is reasonably priced (no more than a good textbook) and offers a short learning curve. Professors can create PDF files from previously used computer files, or if they develop new class materials, they can create the PDF files as easily as printing paper copies of the materials. Students can also create print quality PDF files with the same ease.

PDF files work effectively as e-mail attachments. The size of the PDF file is often less than ten percent of the size of the original computer document. The reduced size of PDF files helps maximize the performance of the typical e-mail system, both on the sending and receiving end of the e-mail connection. PDF files submitted by students can easily be electronically annotated by professors and then e-mailed to students providing timely feedback to the student.

After experimenting with various electronic techniques to exchange student-professor information within a distance education environment, a practical solution was embraced. It was jointly determined, by both faculty and students, that the PDF computer file format provides a cost-effective solution to many course process problems inherent in distance education settings. For distance education participants, PDF computer files eliminate many problems associated with traditional submission of homework and professor feedback. As distance education programs continue to flourish, barriers to effective professor-student communication will continually emerge. Practical solutions, such as those described, can alleviate obstacles impeding the teaching/learning process in distance education.

Recruiting, hiring, and keeping desirable employees are fundamental goals in institutions. Developing an exceptional workforce, however, has usually been a hit-and-miss process. Traditionally, organizations have relied on scholastic achievement, standardized tests, and an assortment of other pedagogical measures to recruit and keep good workers; oftentimes decisions about hiring have been made within the first thirty seconds of an interview.

In 1973, however, David C. McClelland, in a paper titled "Testing for Competence Rather Than Intelligence," related what every public school teacher knows: academic over-achievers are not always the most successful people in their professions (Spencer and Spencer, 1993). McClelland concluded that job selection and performance should be based on desired, observable behaviors, instead of on traditional standardized tests.

National and international companies like Amoco, Dupont, Federal Express, Proctor and Gamble, and Sony are developing competency models to improve the quality of the employees hired and to improve employee performance in the workplace. A national survey of American employers revealed that six of seven desired traits for entry-level workers were non-academic (Goleman, 1998, pp. 12-13). The six were about Emotional Intelligence (EI), defined as "an understanding of how you and others feel, and what to do about it" (Sims, 1998. p. E2).

A 1996-97 study of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service was designed to identify outstanding characteristics of Extension educators. The results were similar to the business survey. The majority of core competencies related to emotional intelligence. This paper discusses emotional intelligence as it relates to a competency model for a large Extension organization.

Generations ago, John Adams, Robert E. Lee and others understood the concept of emotional intelligence. They valued ambition, achievement, flexibility, and sensitivity and knew that people could learn to delay immediate self-gratification (Eicher, 1997; Ellis, 1994). More recently, authors like Daniel Goleman (1998) and Hendrie Weisinger (1998) have discussed the importance of emotional intelligence at work.

Emotional intelligence at work is the ability to understand yourself and others well enough to express emotions in a healthy way, which is critical to job success and career satisfaction (Sims, 1998). Goleman says that professionally successful people have high emotional intelligence in addition to the traditional cognitive intelligence or specialized content knowledge (Goleman, 1998, Linkage Conference). For example, having the expertise to conduct soil sample analyses is important, but it is critical to have the ability to communicate in an effective and sensitive way when the soil results need to be interpreted, or when they are late, or when another sample is needed because the first one was lost or inappropriately secured, or when one of the five or six people you have to work with to get the analyses done is argumentative or uncooperative.

Likewise, it may be important to be able to successfully execute an Extension program, but it may be more essential to be able to effectively interpret more non-traditional programs and graciously retire programs that no longer add value, and then effectively communicate the decision to loyal customers. Similarly, it is good to be technologically adept, but it is invaluable to be able to accept the ambiguity that comes with change, or with the evolution of a project, or with working with diverse groups of people. Successful people, then, have high-level critical thinking skills, technical expertise, and, most importantly, emotional maturity/emotional intelligence.

In his book, Emotional Intelligence...Why it can matter more than IQ, Goleman states that self-motivation, self-control, persistence, and zeal are all a part of Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 1997). Not surprisingly, these behaviors are also associated with core competencies. Competencies are desired behaviors, and core competencies are "personal competencies required of everyone..." (Anderson, 1998, p. 211).

Core competencies identified in the Texas Extension study paralleled the emotional intelligence competencies. For example, "Personal Learning/Self-Development," "Achievement Motivation," and "Initiative" are part of the Extension Competency Model. The definitions of these competencies feature emotional intelligence characteristics. For instance, Personal Learning/Self-Development is defined by the authors as "an important part of creativity in which a person is willing to consider different ideas, and is willing to change and grow according to legitimate feedback from others."

Because emotional intelligence can better predict job success than traditional measures, and because it can be learned, emotional intelligence in competency curriculum development is practical and advisable. The Texas Agricultural Extension Service has begun writing competency activities that introduce emotional intelligence concepts and that develop emotional intelligence attributes. In the Organizational Savvy Competency, participants who seek to develop this competency are asked to summarize ideas about social harmony, group dynamics, and academic talent as they relate to emotional intelligence.

Employees who wish to increase their organizational savvy are asked to record when they have provided leadership for a collaborative project, when they have tried to meet new agents by calling and welcoming them to Extension, and when they have identified national and international trends that might affect the Extension organization. Other activities in the Organizational Savvy Competency refer interested employees to books and web sites that keep them current about a broad scope of Extension programs.

In the Personal Learning/Self-Development Competency, participants are encouraged to take assigned personality tests for self-awareness and interpersonal understanding in the "Activities" section. In the Initiative Competency, employees are encouraged to look for several alternatives before making a decision; they are asked to practice this skill and record their experiences.

These competency-based, development activities help employees increase their emotional intelligence, and they help them to strengthen areas they have personally identified, or that have been identified by their colleagues or supervisors.

The current emphasis on emotional intelligence supported the identified Extension core competencies in the sense that the Extension competencies were comparable to emotional intelligence competencies. Emotional intelligence and competencies are a natural fit, and they will, no doubt, become increasingly popular as Extension organizations recognize the importance of emotional intelligence and competencies in building the Extension workforce for the 21st century.

Anderson, R. (1998, November). Introduction to competency-based systems (Part 1, p 211). Pre-conference workshop at The 5th International Conference & Exposition on Using Competency-Based Tools & Applications to Drive Organizational Performance. Conference presented by Linkage, Inc., One Forbes Road, Lexington, MA.

Eicher, D.J. (1997). Robert E. Lee: A life portrait. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company.

Ellis, J. (1994). Passionate sage: The character and legacy of John Adams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam Books.

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. NY: Bantam.

Goleman, D. (1998, November). The compelling business case for developing emotional intelligence competencies. Keynote address at The 5th International Conference & Exposition on Using Competency-Based Tools & Applications to Drive Organizational Performance. Conference presented by Linkage, Inc., One Forbes Road, Lexington, MA.

Sims, B. (1998, November 8). Handling emotions while on the job. The Eagle, p. E2.

Spencer, Jr., L.M., & Spencer, S.M. (1993). Competence at work: Models for superior performance. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Weisinger, H. (1998). Emotional intelligence at work. San Francisco: Jossy-Bass.

This article is online at http://joe.org/joe/1999december/ent-iw.html.

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