When you are training, instructing, facilitating, teaching, or presenting...

1. your delivery style is best informed by the unique learning preference of each participant.

2. your delivery style is best informed by the expectation about how-best-to-learn that each participant shares with other participants from his or her national background.

This website gives you an opportunity to discover what a sociocultural approach has to contribute to an overall understanding of how adults around the world best absorb information and skills in classroom-style presentations of any kind.

A sociocultural understanding is highly applicable in cases in which the national background of the presenter or instructor is different from that of the audience members or learners.
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Challenge and Response
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Now approaching its 50th year, the research-based field of intercultural communications has offered practical advice and nuanced understanding regarding a wide range of cross-cultural challenges faced by businesspeople, diplomats, missionaries, educators, and many others.  But very little support has been offered to classroom teachers, nor to business trainers, facilitators, and presenters, who find themselves confronted, again and again, by a room full of participants from other nations.  This specific challenge was accepted long ago by Dr. Cornelius Grove, GROVEWELL's founder and partner.

Over many decades, anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists, social reformers, journalists, and educational researchers have been studying classrooms in schools, universities, and businesses around the world.  Insider accounts have been written by teachers, trainers, professors, students, and trainees.  A few accounts from long-bygone eras can be found as well.  These descriptions and analyses either reveal classroom activities within a single nation, or contrast the classrooms of two selected nations. 

Careful study of these descriptions and analyses leads to the conclusion that there are recognizable patterns of classroom interaction that differ across national cultures in reasonably stable and predictable ways.  These differences are grounded in assumptions and values similar to those familiar to interculturalists.  And in the finest tradition of the intercultural field, an understanding of these patterned differences can be converted into practical guidelines for "stand-up" trainers, instructors, facilitators, and presenters.

This is what Dr. Grove is now working to accomplish.
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Outcomes and Offerings
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Dr. Grove's decades of research are leading to these outcomes:

1.  His paper, "Understanding the Two Instructional Style Prototypes: Pathways to Success in Internationally Diverse Classrooms," was published in 2006; to read an abstract of this 10,000-word paper, click here.  A much shorter paper overviewing the two styles may be read in full on this website: click here.

2.  Dr. Grove is currently in the final stages of preparing a paper of about 20,000 words on the pre-history of the Learner-Focused paradigm (i.e., educational progressivism).  The paper explores contributing factors between the invention of the printing press (mid-1400s) and the decline of the Child Study Movement (early 1900s). 

3. Dr. Grove is planning two books.  One is tentatively entitled Tactics for Trainers of Adults from Abroad ; click here for an overview.  The other will be an expanded, in-depth exploration of the two instructional styles in historical and global perspective; the paper cited in item 2 above will be part of that book.

4.  Dr. Grove offers a training workshop for professionals who find themselves in the role of instructor, trainer, facilitator, or presenter in front of learners or listeners from other, unfamiliar, nations.  This workshop is entitled Dr. Grove's Toolkit for Effective Presentations to Nationally Mixed Audiences.  For details, click on the lefthand option immediately below.
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If your visit to this website relates to teaching, training, or presenting in front of learners or participants from other nations, click here.

If your visit to this website relates to an interest in cross-cultural research on instructional styles or classroom cultures worldwide, click here.

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Additional Information
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For a brief, interactive introduction to Dr. Grove's insights, please visit his 12-item "Worldwide Presentation Quiz" by continuing here.

For a brief article that introduces Dr. Grove's insights, please read "How People from Different Cultures Expect to Learn" by continuing here. 

For Dr. Grove's perspective on "learning styles," click here.

For a full professional biography of Dr. Grove, click here.

To obtain specific information, or to inquire about engaging GROVEWELL's services, contact info@grovewell.com.