Conversation Cafe – OneHE

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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