Scenario: Cohort of online facilitators seeking to integrate Liberating Structures activities into their learning delivery with the goal of better meeting learner needs and increasing learner engagement.
Purpose:
- Introduce approaches to online facilitation of LS activities via an online experiential course
- Acknowledge and address participant concerns about applying an LS approach in their online facilitation
- Have participants prepare for possible consequences emerging from their online facilitation of LS activities
Liberating Structures:
- Drawing Together
- Using Padlet -- in groups of 3 -- participants draw their individual response to the question: What is your biggest fear about facilitating an LS activity online?
- Using a Troika approach -- participants group into successive 2s and consult to interpret the drawing of the 1 -- consultations take the form of comments under each drawing in the Padlet
- Each triad reports back to whole group in the course LMS -- acting out the fears interpreted in the form of an improv discussion forum thread
- Critical Uncertainties
- Using the text tool in red font on a whiteboard in a Collaborate web conference -- participants make a list of uncertainties in response to the question: What factors are impossible to predict or control their direction as you facilitate LS activities online?
- Using the text tool to change to blue font some list items -- participants prioritize the most critical factors in response to the question: Which factors threaten your ability to facilitate successfully?
- By circling two blue items -- participants select the two most critical and most uncertain items
- Facilitator takes a screenshot of the whiteboard to save as an artifact and then opens a clean whiteboard -- facilitator draws grid on whiteboard with more of/less of X and Y axes -- one with the most critical item and the other with the most uncertain item
- Participants divide into 4 small groups -- each group takes one quadrant of the grid -- groups are sent into 4 breakout rooms
- In the breakout rooms -- each group writes a thumbnail scenario for their quadrant and brainstorms 3 strategies that would help the group operate in that scenario
- Facilitator takes screenshot of each group's whiteboard to save as artifacts
- All groups meet back in the main room -- report on their scenarios and strategies to the whole group
- Whole group sifts results to identify robust/hedging strategies
- Facilitator uploads all artifacts to LMS
- Min Specs
- Using a Wiki in an LMS -- participants make a list of all the do’s and
don’ts to pay attention to in order to successfully facilitate an LS activity online
- While screen-sharing the Wiki page In a Collaborate web conference -- participants sift through the list one item at a time and strike-through every rule that gets a positive answer to the question: If we broke or ignored this rule, could we still successfully facilitate an online LS Activity?
- Participants reduce list to the absolute minimum needed to successfully facilitate an LS activity online
Notes: the activities above:
- would constitute part of a course on facilitating LS activities online
- would take three separate sessions to complete
- are conceived of as building on each other sequentially -- i.e. the thinking and outputs generated in Activity 1 would constitute the inputs to Activity 2, etc.