Session III a: July 25-29, 2011

34. Interactive Experiential Strategies for Intercultural Training Tracy Tagliati and Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan Here’s a workshop that “walks the talk”: an interactive, experiential workshop on interactive experiential strategies. In addition to hands-on design, development, and facilitation of interactive training, participants will leave with a portfolio of state-of-the-art games, exercises, templates, checklists, and online resources suitable for a wide range of intercultural situations.

Designed for Objectives Learning Activities Traci Tagliati Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan Trainers, educators, and other interculturalists who want to extend their repertoire of teaching techniques and who want their participants to be engaged and immersed in the learning process. Participants will have the opportunity to: Provide a rationale for the use of interactive experiential strategies for improving the performance of individuals and multicultural teams Classify 60 interactive experiential strategies into different categories and select the most appropriate strategy to suit the cultural characteristics of participants and types of performance objectives Design and develop interactive experiential activities for use in intercultural settings by using alternative instructional systems models Evaluate interactive experiential strategies with intercultural groups and improve their motivational and instructional effectiveness based on feedback data Facilitate an interactive experiential activity, adjusting critical cultural variables (such as pace, intensity of competition, and amount of self-disclosure) in real time Use a systematic procedure for designing and implementing debriefing protocols to improve the impact of interactive experiential activities These will include: Interactive lectures on psychological, sociological, anthropological, and business rationales for the use of interactive experiential approaches to improving the performance of multicultural groups A variety of training games, simulation games, role plays, puzzles, web-based games, and team-building exercises for multicultural training Individual and team development of training games, simulations, role plays, and other interactive experiential strategies for use in multicultural groups Structured sharing activities for exploring the challenges associated with facilitating multicultural groups Rapid design of training activities that incorporate a variety of existing content resources, ranging from news items, through scholarly books, to movies produced in other countries   Tracy Tagliati was born in England and grew up in various U.S. Air Force stations in Europe, Japan, and throughout the United States. As the senior training associate of the Thiagi Group, Tracy specializes in designing and facilitating training workshops for multinational corporations in various locations around the world. She is active in ASTD, the International Society for Performance and Instruction (ISPI), and is a member of the Executive Board of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA).   Dr. Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan is the CEO of the Thiagi Group, Inc., an organization with the mission of helping people improve their performance effectively, enjoyably, and ethically. He has lived and worked in three different cultures (India, the U.S., and Liberia) and has conducted training workshops in 16 different countries. Since 1998, Thiagi has been designing a new interactive experiential activity every day (including weekends and holidays).