The journey through Theme 3 was tremendously rich (knowledge-wise), strenuous (I was one of the moderators), and (emotionally) intense.
We experimented with facilitation techniques new to me and helpful to explore the third theme of the course. These four meetings allowed me to find potential responses to the question posed by the scenario: "How can I get people to really recognize the value of becoming part of a learning community and experience the benefits of social learning?”.
The “how” of the question requires us to create the conditions for people to develop a sense of community, feel welcomed and maybe less frustrated especially with online classes (Capdeferro & Romero 2012).
To reach this goal in our PBL07, we started every meeting with a Check-In and conclude it with a Check-Outs. As said by Niklaus Gerber (2020) "People engage in rituals to achieve a broad set of desired outcomes. Rituals support a team to work efficiently and can be a way to change culture and habits and help you establish a framework for being productive (...) Check-in processes are fundamental for the work the team engages in and for setting its purpose [while] Checking-out invites each member in a group to be present, seen, and heard. Checking-out emphasises reflection and closure.".
As teacher, I think that it would be useful to create rituals with students to build a sense of belonging and collective effort, which maybe can help them to engage more in what they are asked to do.
In our PBL07, these rituals set the ground for the following activities that we have designed to mostly recuperate a dialogic dimension to our collective work, by minimising the role of technology to not let it take over the relational aspect. After all, (at least in this course) technology is a means not an end of learning: it plays a crucial role but, still, a role of serving the purpose of learning together - as Theme 3 is inviting us to do.
Among all the activities that we did together (per each and every one we have provided a link in the final output of PBL07, in Miro), I like to mention the Collective Story Harvesting (2018): “Collective Story Harvesting is a storytelling process that enables us to deeply connect with and learn from the experience in our community, team or organization. It builds our capacity for targeted listening, group learning and therein for collective meaning making. Collective Story Harvesting takes learning to a deeper level as it surfaces insights that exist beneath the surface of our stories.”
In PBL07, one of us volunteered to tell a story related to Theme 3 while the others were listening, having in mind one out of 3 suggested perspectives (provided by the moderators: challenges, opportunities, relationships). Once the story was told, the listeners gathered in a breakout room defined by one of the perspectives to discuss the story from that specific perspective. The storyteller was allowed to "fly" (a metaphor and behaviour that we borrowed from the Open Space Technology technique that I mentioned in a previous post) from one breakout room to another and just listen, without interfering with the ongoing conversation. Eventually, we reconvened in the main room and the storyteller was asked to tell us what she harvested from listening.
This simple activity can easily be adapted and transferred into a classroom for multiple purposes and applied to different subjects as well. As said on this webpage that I invite you to refer to, “The method is ideal on the one hand to learn where we are in a project, and on the other hand to tell a story in such a way that it can be told to another audience: free of unnecessary details, crisp, powerful and following a recurrent theme”.
It was an intense experience that proved the benefits of social learning as it provided multiple views to confront with. But it was much more than a mere exercise and this “more” will stay with the PBL07 group only.
References
Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.
Collective Story Harvesting (2018), available at: https://www.collaboratiohelvetica.ch/en/blog/collective-story-harvesting (retrieved: April 25, 2022)
Gerber, N. (2020). How Check-Ins and Check-Outs will help you to build stronger teams, available at: https://medium.com/@niklausgerber/team-check-ins-and-check-outs-376aaef9357f (retrieved: April 11, 2022).