Purpose to Practice

Activity

Liberating Structures, Setting the tone activities

Purpose to Practice

Maha Bali

Use the Purpose to Practice structure with students to co-develop community guidelines for the class.

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

To co-develop a set of ‘community guidelines’ for the class with students, using a structured approach called Purpose to Practice which reminds us all that while guidelines are often lists of practices/behaviors that are acceptable/unacceptable in a certain context, they should always be rooted in the purpose behind them.

USEFUL FOR

Creating a safe space collaboratively with students, promoting reflection. Can be done at the beginning of the semester, revised in the middle of the semester. This activity encourages collaboration, creative thinking, and goal-oriented planning.

PREPARATION

Encourage students to bring to class any ‘codes of conduct’ or ‘community guidelines’ they have seen before, and/or bring your own, so that students can have a starting point if they are unfamiliar with this notion.
Prepare slides with instructions.
Prepare a collaborative space for brainstorming. Best if it is a visual space that allows creating and moving sticky notes of different colours – like Jamboard or Mural.

INSTRUCTIONS

Divide students into small groups of 4-6 people.
Explain that the purpose of the activity is to develop a plan to achieve a shared goal.
Ask the group to agree on a goal related to the course or subject matter.
Give students 2-3 minutes to think on their own about the goal and write down any ideas that come to mind.
Have each student share their ideas with their small group using the 1-4-all embedded structure.
Next, ask the small groups to work together to write out principles, participants, structures, and practices that would be needed to achieve the group’s goal. Give them 10-15 minutes to work together.
After the small groups have completed their plans, have each group share their plan with the rest of the class.
Discuss and compare the plans. Encourage students to identify similarities and differences, and to ask questions about the other groups’ plans.
This can be done early in the semester but is likely to benefit from revision midway through the semester.

DURATION

This could take an entire class session if you do it synchronously.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

You can ask students to work on this in pairs asynchronously (students can meet synchronously outside class time) or different students to work on different parts of it.
You can show students a sample community guidelines document and encourage them to annotate it, like the Annotated Syllabus (see Remi Kalir’s video in this collection).
You can ask students to vote on suggested edits to a starter list of guidelines.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Breakout rooms to divide students into smaller groups.
Some space for collaborative editing. It could simply be a Google doc for each group, but something more visual like Jamboard (from Google), Mural or Miro can help so people can move sticky notes around. The video uses Jamboard which is free. Mural and Miro have a small learning curve and more features.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Purpose to Practice Liberating Structures description
Slide deck used in the video
What are Liberating Structures?

Sample guidelines for online classes for students to remix:

Community Guidelines for Online Learning An Example from Heather Mayer
HumanMOOC guidelines from Matt Crosslin
Michelle Pacansky-Brock
The core rules of netiquette
Shades of Noir

Sample guidelines shared in the video (mostly not for classes):

Mozilla, shared by Mia Zamora
Rules of Netiquette shared by Rissa Sorensen-Unruh
RSA Conference shared by Ken Bauer

Watch Video

ABOUT

Educator prep: None
Student prep: None
Asynchronous
Video conferencing, Breakout rooms
Duration: Variable

This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.

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