Hi Russ and Michelle (and anyone else browsing here),
Going into this activity I knew that I wanted to apply LS to one one of our team's professional development offerings for instructors here at Yukon college. After swimming around a bit among the LS resources, I decided to develop an activity for our course design intensive (CDI) workshop that applies the LS principle of creative destruction ?.
What is the group scenario you are considering for Liberating Structures?
The CDI workshop usually includes 6-8 participants and 2-3 facilitators. The group meets for four full days, spread out over 2-4 weeks depending on the time of year. Each participant brings a course that they're working on, and the sessions combine group activities to explore/generate ideas, individual application, and peer feedback.
What is the key purpose for the group gathering?
The key purpose of this activity is to evaluate a course that is under revision and identify which parts should be removed or revised. Each instructor will be working on their own course and context, so they will have different answers to these questions.
Liberating Structure and Draft Invitation:
TRIZ (Stop Counterproductive Activities and Behaviors to Make Space for Innovation) is a Liberating Structure with creative destruction at its core. I would modify it slightly to reflect the fact that each participant is working on a unique course/context.
In this three-step process, we would ask:
- “Make a list of all you can do in the design of your course (content, learning outcomes, assessments, activities, ....) to make sure that students experience as little meaningful learning as possible.”
- “Go down this list item by item and ask yourselves, ‘Is there anything in the current version of the course that in any way, shape, or form resembles this item?’ Be brutally honest to make a second list of all your counterproductive elements.”
- “Go through the items on your second list and decide what first steps you can take to address the elements that you've identified as creating an undesirable results?”
TRIZ normally includes cycles of 1-2-4-All for each of the three questions, where participants pool their ideas. In this case, the participants will each be working on different courses and therefore generating distinct answers. Given this diversity and the small size of the group, I think a more appropriate means of sharing would be pair discussions followed by whole-group sharing where each person shares something that their partner came up with (sort of like an appreciative interview). Participants could add to their list if they agree with something they heard, but don't need to combine their lists into one.
Please let me know if you have any questions - I look forward to your feedback!