Moderator Toolbox

PEACHy Questions Active Listening Tips and Tools Using the Relationship Model Diagnosing the 5 Stages

         The work of an SD Moderator is demanding and time-consuming, but also extremely rewarding and critically important to making Sustained Dialogue an effective agent of change on your campus. Sustained Dialogue has the capacity to improve communitities – but only when implemented effectively. It is the quality of dialogue groups in an SD program rather than the quanity that makes a campus’s program strong.

 

If you’re reading this page, you have either participated in an SD group before, or have taken on a leadership role in an SD program in its infancy. Regardless, as the moderator of an SD group, you and your co-moderator have the responsibility and the opportunity to bring together students who might not ordinarily get to know one another in a safe but challenging space.

 

Whether you’re moderating a group for the first time or the fourth, each group presents unique challenges, by virtue of its unique dynamic. We encourage you throughout the year to call on SDCN and the resources that we make available. The skills that you will develop in this role will prove more useful and in more contexts than you may realize. Moderating an SD group is an eye-opening experience: it reveals your own capacity to make communication and connection possible between the most unlikely of individuals. As a moderator, you can credit yourself with making this diverse movement of passionate students happen. Hard work is in store in moderating Sustained Dialogue. Our experience shows, however, that students have the capacity to improve community relations on their campus. Please know that you have company in this important work.

 

Are you a potential program leader?   The success of an SD program rides not just on well-moderated dialogue groups. A strong SD program also requires an Executive Board to manage organizational projects and program development. This team meets such programmatic needs as budgeting, record-keeping, event-managing, and public relations, while also serving as the official voice of the SD program in the school community. If you are an adept manager and organizer, consider working on your school’s SD executive board!!

  SDCN exists in order to make your job as a moderator as straightforward as possible. Please contact us by email or phone, and make use of the tips and resources made available on this page. Specifically, this page connects you to notes regarding:

 

Again, we can’t emphasize enough how much you, your group participants, and your community have to gain from your work as a moderator. Enjoy this experience – it promises to enrich your experience at school, and others’ as well!

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

• Revisit last meeting, discuss agenda, open with a question