Session Outline

This interactive workshop will use the Lego® Serious Play® (LSP) method to develop ideas for a tutoring framework which could encourage students as they progress through their studies to become independent self-regulated learners. Participants will work remotely, but collaboratively, through a serious of challenges. These challenges will be devised to lead towards the overarching objective of the session “to develop an inclusive supportive tutoring structure”.

The facilitator will set build challenges, and participants will be given a brief time to build a model representing their response to the challenges. upon completion of the task, participants will be asked to share the story of their own model, and the group will collectively explore each model, before reflecting upon what has been created and seeking deeper insights. As the workshop progresses the participants work through development of Lego skills via various new challenges, using bricks as metaphors and storytelling before addressing the development of the ideal tutoring structure.

The LSP method evolved as a tool to support business strategy development in the 1990s, as a means to move towards more subjective, creative ways of harnessing collective vision (Blair & Rillo, 2016). Since then the method has moved beyond the corporate sphere, and is being successfully applied to educational contexts, and specifically HE contexts, both in classroom scenarios and in curriculum planning. The technique has been found to be particularly useful in multi-disciplinary scenarios, the metaphorical application of meaning to Lego helps to break down communication barriers, thereby increasing participants’ ability to understand others’ perspectives (Nørgaard Jensen, Payson Seager, & Cook-Davis, 2018).

LSP involves groups of individuals working together, through the medium of Lego, to answer ‘big questions’. By using a well known medium, Lego bricks, in a metaphorical way LSP has the potential to unlock levels of creativity (Nørgaard Jensen et al., 2018). The systematic process encourages experiential learning, while the collaborative nature of the activity, similar to Wegerif’s Dialogic Education (2013) encourages dialogue resulting in answers to questions which are derived from the group rather than being attributable to any one individual. The storytelling element of LSP reframes individual ideas into shared perspectives, making it an ideal tool to support collaborative development of tutoring curricula. In this way the workshop will bring together the ideas of all participants to craft a shared possible tutoring structure.

By the end of this workshop participants will have collaboratively developed their understanding of what an inclusive tutoring framework could look like. Through discussion, they will have appraised options, and identified ideas which they can then apply to their own contexts.