The Elegant GNOME

The GNOME acronym can help you prepare and plan a learning encounter, workshop, or meeting. It stands for:

• Goals: What do you want the participants to achieve in the long term?

• Needs: What are the participants' prior knowledge, skills, interests, and motivations? What are their needs? This could be physical, psychological, emotional, learning needs or social. 

• Outcomes: What specific knowledge and skills should the participants be able to demonstrate at the end of the session?

• Methods: What teaching and learning methods will you use to help the participants achieve the outcomes?

• Evaluation: How will you assess the participants' learning to determine whether the outcomes have been achieved?

The GNOME tool is deceptively simple, but it can achieve elegant results. You can use it to:

• Develop a plan to deliver teaching

• Create a tangible experience for co-creative work

• Prototype design thinking

• Achieve constructive alignment

• Establish a shared vision and support group dialogue

• Recall and use a structure to organize your thinking

• Support evaluation, reflection, and feedback

• Operationalize the teaching process

• Provide a structure and create psychological safety

• Enable off-script work

Here are some examples of how you might use the GNOME tool:

• Planning a tutorial or small group work session

• Organizing a workshop, seminar, or conference

• Facilitating a meeting

• Any situation where there is group or teamwork

The GNOME tool can help you meet the universal needs of safety, learning, prioritization, meaningfulness and purpose, connection, and sharing.

Related ideas 

Biggs Constructive alignment 

Strategic alignment