Activity
Liberating Structures, Ongoing engagement
Conversation Cafe
Maha Bali
Mia Zamora
Autumm Caines
Engage everyone in making sense of profound challenges. Use to address difficult or confusing topics.
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ACTIVITY PURPOSE
According to the Liberating Structures website, it ‘engages everyone in making sense of profound challenges. It can be used to address difficult or confusing topics, build trust and share perspectives.’
USEFUL FOR
Encouraging equitable conversations and perspective-taking. Encouraging constructive listening.
PREPARATION
Prompt, instructions, and space for students to take notes.
INSTRUCTIONS
- Introduce the activity to your students: explain that the Conversation Cafe is a way for them to engage in open and respectful conversations with their peers.
- Set ground rules and introduce a theme or topic.
- Get students into small groups of 4-5.
- Send the small groups into breakout rooms with timed rounds of conversation to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate. Ask them to assign a time keeper who will manage time and a note taker.
- Sequence of steps in breakout rooms:
Round 1 (4-5 mins) – ask each student to share what they think, feel or do about the theme or topic.
Round 2 (4-5 mins) – ask each student to share their thoughts and feelings after having listened to everybody in their group.
Round 3 (4-5 mins) – open conversation.
Round 4 (4-5 mins) – each student shares ‘takeaways’.
DURATION
At a minimum: around 16 minutes if you have 4 participants per group, or 20 minutes if you have 5 participants in the group. However, you can increase the time for the ‘open’ round of conversation to 10 minutes instead of 4-5.
ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES
None.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
Breakout rooms and either asking students to record them, or take notes in a shared space like a Google slide or Google doc.
USEFUL RESOURCES
Slides to adapt.
Conversation Café – Liberating structures website.
View Virtual Conversation Cafe description.
What are Liberating Structures?
Watch Video
ABOUT
- Educator prep: None
- Student prep: None
- Asynchronous
- Video conferencing, Breakout rooms, Shared online space
- Duration: 5-30 mins
This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.
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