2025 Pre-Con: INSPIRE, ENGAGE, CONNECT AND REFLECT

Join this interactive workshop and fill your toolbox with brain-based methods to inspire, engage, and create lasting, meaningful lessons. Enliven teaching, group work, circles, meetings, and counseling with engaging, experiential techniques, including movement, metaphor, art, and interactive dialogue to increase emotional connection, relevancy, and depth of understanding.

Explore practical ways to cultivate belonging, involvement, participant voice, choice, ownership, and application of learning. Integrate academics, training, or counseling lesson content with essential life skills, 21st Century Learning, and social-emotional competencies. Bring learning to life and take advantage of teachable moments with active participant-centered review and reflection techniques. Use the power of experiential learning to build a joyful, connected community. Take away inspiration, new perspectives, and practical tools for weaving meaningful reflection and connection throughout your programs.

Attendees will take away:
•  Strategies to empower participants of all ages in all kinds of learning and groupwork situations
•  Collaborative, learner-centered ways to create and maintain joyful and inclusive learning, communities
•Experiential, brain-based techniques to teach and review academic, counseling and training content
•Engaging ways to deepen learning through emotional connection and ongoing active reflection
•Intentional approaches for promoting involvement, voice, choice, and ownership of learning
•Practical strategies to integrate social-emotional and life skills with academics or program content that you can facilitate with simple materials and adapt to various audiences
•Groupwork, advisory, morning meetings, and circles facilitation ideas
•Games and activities that teach empathy, self and social awareness, communication, and other essential social and emotional skills
•Facilitation strategies to make experiential learning successful.
•Practices for becoming an intentional, responsive, and reflective educator/facilitator

Join us for an inspiring day of networking and meaningful conversation with other experiential practitioners.

Jen Stanchfield inspires group facilitators and educators worldwide with engaging, informative, practical workshops and books. By emphasizing relationships and connection, she blends the art of experiential teaching and facilitation with neuroscience and social and emotional learning. Jen works with schools, colleges, mental health, and community organizations across the globe, helping practitioners increase meaningful engagement and reflection and build community. 
 
With her creative and responsive approach, Jen has significantly contributed to the field by offering tools and techniques that make reflection an accessible and interactive part of learning. She is the author of Tips and Tools for The Art of Experiential Group Facilitation and Inspired Educator, Inspired Learner: Experiential, Brain-Based Activities and Strategies to Engage, Build Community, and Create Lasting Lessons. In addition, she is the creator and regular contributor to the Inspired Educator Blog at experientialtools.com.
 
Jen’s creativity and depth of knowledge stem from three decades of diverse experience as an experiential educator and facilitator. Jen has worked as a teacher, an expressive/recreational therapist in community and clinical mental health, in youth development programs from gardening to adventure education, and as a professional development facilitator, adult learning, graduate courses, and organizational team building. She earned her B.S. in Therapeutic Recreation and Outdoor Education from the University of New Hampshire and her M.S. in Experiential Education at Minnesota State University. She founded Experiential Tools and has created a unique collection of engagement tools used by teachers, mental health counselors, and facilitators worldwide.