Open Forum

What's next!

Put my LS Activity into my lesson plan! 

See where else I can pepper my lesson plan with LS.

Go back and see other Activities participants posted in the feedback forum.

BIG thank you to Leva and Beth for doing such a great job on this FLOW Micro course and offering it!

Warmly,

Rachelle

I'll refine the LS activity that I started here (with help from the feedback received in my triad) and pitch it to my team for inclusion in our next course design workshop.

I would like to develop and facilitate a FLO-micro course, ideally sometime in winter 2020.  Start by identifying a topic.

I'm still wrapping my head around when and how to introduce LS as a tool for the very busy instructors that I support.  I'll spend some more time reflecting on this experience and see if I can distill out something that will work for our context.

Thanks everyone, and especially Beth and Leva, for thought-provoking week.  This is a wonderful community of teachers and learners, and I feel lucky to be connected with you all in this way.

• What actions make sense now for you to take in implementing LS in your context?
• What would help you move forward?
• What impact do you expect LS to have on your teaching and learning activities in the future?
• What will you do next?

• I'm considering how we can further support our community of practice to use LS in their network building efforts- some of this happening already by naming and linking to the LS as we use them in our online gatherings.
• Actively working with other pracitioners- grateful to share this work with my co-facilitator.
• Impact- noticing the interst in using LS to seed more facilitation of LS in health
• Debrief the online session from last night I facilitated (Impromptu Networking, Celebrity Interview, 1,24, all and a simplified 25/10 crowdsourcing (using padlet) with the group.
  

I have already been sharing ideas with colleagues about using LS in our trainings. I will test out LS in an upcoming team meeting. I think it will help to make sure everyone's thoughts are heard and that we will be able to generate some potential solutions to an ongoing issue.

Next I will be continuing to research LS and restructure my workshop timeline to make room for LS.  

I'm pretty excited to see the outcomes!

I am very curious to dig deeper into the LS I didn't explore much during this week. I would also like to read through some of the activities proposed by others in the course. I really appreciate these short courses as an opportunity to dive into a topic, engage with peers, and access a toolbox of resources. Thank you for the excellent and thoughtful facilitation!

Best,
Sue

Now what????

• Be more mindful of including principles of LS and some of the patterns/themes in my work more generally. 
• Propose the session designed here to the team that is going to be delivering it. 
• Create more linkages between my existing communities and LS, for example by including some LS (via some local practitioners) in my upcoming graphic facilitation workshop either via embedding LS into existing visual exercises and/or a separate taster evening between day 1 and day 2.
• Be more open to online experiences! 

Good luck to everyone....I'm sure we will meet again on the LS journey!  

I feel like to only scratched the surface of Liberating Structures and want to learn more. I'll be looking into other opportunities to explore these tools and ways to incorporate them into my professional and personal life. 

I'll spend some more time with other LS structures that I haven't used yet, in particular TRIZ (because that approach just makes me laugh out loud - don't we all know people who think negatively as a starting point anyways?)

The LS that I structured during this week will be useful next January (! so far from now) and to keep this learning more current, I am going to find places where I can slide LS into Fall 2019 courses. I love the idea of the 15% as a way of helping students perhaps think about what they CAN control already, before they dive into the full-on semester that often feels like a bunch of assignments and calendar-pacing that is not set by them individually.

I dig the "LS Matchmaker" handout and will be using that again, for sure.

In terms of a Board of Directors that I'm on, I'm also going to actively think about when/how an LS could be applied. We are in the midst of a lot of fundraising and I'd say we need some new thinking about our expectations and around what we can and can't control.

Thanks to all the participants for really interesting, engaged, thoughtful discussions. Thanks to Beth and Leva for a great course structure and facilitation. 

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Hello all,

Now I will revise the activity I drafted  - integrating the feedback received and other ideas that bubbled up during the reflection process.  Timeline: By end of next week! 

I will also take some time to review other participant contributions over the weekend. I only had time to scan during the work week and now plan to enjoy a good reflective read over the next couple of days. 

Warm regards, Donna

A couple of questions that emerged during the course were: (1) How can LS operate in international/multinational contexts, and (2) How can LS operate in online/asynchronous contexts.

As my brain tries to untangle what happened this week, it strikes me that one important factor in the success of the LS activities in the course was the immersive experience -- we did a lot of LS thinking/working/production in five days straight -- much more than I've seen done in most online courses.

Reminds me of a facilitation experience I had back in the day as a summer camp counsellor for international youth at Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific -- which if you don't know it is a small, remote, rural campus on Vancouver Island. The participants arrived as young individuals from all over the world, spanning all social classes (many were there on financial need-based scholarships) and levels of confidence (many came as 'troubled youth') -- via air and then ferry and then van -- to co-exist for two intense months in this intimate, isolated location with only one another for support (we took away their phones and money upon arrival). They came as strangers and left as the closest of friends -- sobbing as they departed because they knew they were going back to their workaday lives with a very low likelihood of coming together again or recreating that experience.

There is an overlap for me between the questions about LS operating in international/multinational contexts and online/asynchronous contexts -- in both cases we are talking about participants (and facilitators) getting their bearings in unfamiliar worlds. This may actually be an advantage when it comes to facilitating LS activities, as people are already broken away from their workaday worlds.  If the facilitator is successful in creating an immersive experience -- and I think the effective use of time is one key factor in doing this (I'm thinking about the rigidity of time limits in the sequencing of LS activities) -- then a 'microculture' can be created in these worlds which is conducive to LS work.

All assumptions, I know -- but makes me wonder if this course would have produced the same results had the same activities been conducted over a two-week period.

I can see me using LS both in f2f environments and online. I like how the structures can be adapted for both arenas.

I am going to keep learning about the various strategies and will definitely use them in my teaching. And I'm looking forward to sharpening my technical skills so that I can incorporate LS more in the online environment.

I see that thoughtful planning is key and so that's my next step. I'll be using the draft plan I made, and will start polishing it.

I'm excited about these new avenues opening up.

Thanks for giving me some new tools! Sylvia