Returned from my travels, I had the opportunity to run my second experiential learning activity on behalf of the John Curtin Leadership Academy (JCLA) at Curtin University.
Ice-Cream?
The Ice-cream Challenge is a workshop run during the JCLA and John Curtin Undergraduate Scholars (JCUS) programs aimed at making participants more aware of societal challenges and inspiring them to become change makers.
Having previously participated in the workshop as a student and helped facilitate it as a mentor, I grabbed the opportunity to run the workshop at the most recent JCLA camp.
Due to the nature of the activity, where spoilers will reduce its impact on the participants, I will not be discussing the finer details. Nor will I be including any pictures from the camp. Instead, I will be talking more about the things that I learned.
Having previously participated in the workshop as a student and helped facilitate it as a mentor, I grabbed the opportunity to run the workshop at the most recent JCLA camp.
Due to the nature of the activity, where spoilers will reduce its impact on the participants, I will not be discussing the finer details. Nor will I be including any pictures from the camp. Instead, I will be talking more about the things that I learned.
1. Resources
Since this was a workshop that been previously run, with a set of resources carried through the years, the budget for additional resources was small to nil. Thankfully, most of the resources necessary were already present. For the one thing that we couldn't keep, boxes, simply because they consumed too much space, Bunnings (a local hardware chain) was the best place to get some, in the right sizes for free. As they use these instead of plastic bags, its worth being considerate of this and taking only what you need.
Working with existing resources made for a pleasant change compared to scrounging together a set when you have such a small budget. In particular, not knowing whether there would be enough money, I found the options for printed fake Australian or Monopoly money rather scarce, generally only sold in insufficient quantities or with a poor spread of values. I mean, what's the point of four $1 coins. You can't even make a $5 note with that...
Working with existing resources made for a pleasant change compared to scrounging together a set when you have such a small budget. In particular, not knowing whether there would be enough money, I found the options for printed fake Australian or Monopoly money rather scarce, generally only sold in insufficient quantities or with a poor spread of values. I mean, what's the point of four $1 coins. You can't even make a $5 note with that...
Bunnings is a great place to grab some free boxes.
2. Time Management
Unlike with my previous "Global Dinner" experience, I did not have control over when or where the workshop would be taking place and there were other activities book-ending my own.
In my schedule, I had used duration into the workshop to note when things should happen rather than actual times and this led to me having to continually recalculate the times when certain things had to happen. In future, I would keep the durations, but also add a column to allow actual times to be included, so the schedule could be adapted for any time of day, while making easy to reference.
As a result, the 'activity' portion of the workshop may have gone a few minutes longer than I expected, while the 'debrief' portion certainly did. That was mainly because we expected each student to answer one particular question and many took some time to talk through their answers. Perhaps we should have asked the students to keep their answers concise, or next time just provide more time for the 'debrief' portion of the workshop.
In my schedule, I had used duration into the workshop to note when things should happen rather than actual times and this led to me having to continually recalculate the times when certain things had to happen. In future, I would keep the durations, but also add a column to allow actual times to be included, so the schedule could be adapted for any time of day, while making easy to reference.
As a result, the 'activity' portion of the workshop may have gone a few minutes longer than I expected, while the 'debrief' portion certainly did. That was mainly because we expected each student to answer one particular question and many took some time to talk through their answers. Perhaps we should have asked the students to keep their answers concise, or next time just provide more time for the 'debrief' portion of the workshop.
Stock photos for 'professional' presentations are great at just being vague enough, aren't they?
3. Experienced Participants
This was the first time that I had encountered participants that may have previously experienced this activity, particularly if they had attended the JCUS camp before. The impact this would have on the workshop depends a lot on the personality of the participants. If these participants are known, then they can be placed into groups where they would tend to have the least effect if they chose to 'spoil' the experience.
In addition, we simply asked any experienced participants not to 'spoil' the 'activity' portion of the workshop by not talking about their previous experiences. Where participants began to push those boundaries, harsh in-activity penalties were applied, which both reduced the propagation of this behaviour and reinforced those aspects of the workshop that had the greatest impact on the participants.
In addition, we simply asked any experienced participants not to 'spoil' the 'activity' portion of the workshop by not talking about their previous experiences. Where participants began to push those boundaries, harsh in-activity penalties were applied, which both reduced the propagation of this behaviour and reinforced those aspects of the workshop that had the greatest impact on the participants.
This is the last thing you want the experienced participant to start doing.
4. Codification
This was the first time the workshop had been run with a written set of rules and expectations for how the facilitators were expected to behave during the activity. Primarily to allow future head facilitators, other than myself, to run this activity, it also helped to reduce confusion amongst the facilitators about their roles.
That said, a quick run through of these rules during the briefing with the facilitators helped tremendously to emphasis the important behaviours required, which is more difficult to do in the written form. Not everything could be codified, particularly the many small nuances in the facilitator roles depending on the duration into the game and the group of participants they were interacting with.
As the head facilitator, I spent a lot more of my time walking around and adjusting the flow of the activity than I expected to. This was primarily because none of the mentors had previously facilitated this workshop and having someone working outside their roles to supervise and adjust the dynamics of the workshop to maximise the impact of the experience is vital.
That said, a quick run through of these rules during the briefing with the facilitators helped tremendously to emphasis the important behaviours required, which is more difficult to do in the written form. Not everything could be codified, particularly the many small nuances in the facilitator roles depending on the duration into the game and the group of participants they were interacting with.
As the head facilitator, I spent a lot more of my time walking around and adjusting the flow of the activity than I expected to. This was primarily because none of the mentors had previously facilitated this workshop and having someone working outside their roles to supervise and adjust the dynamics of the workshop to maximise the impact of the experience is vital.
Business graphics really do suit every need!
Conclusions
The impact the 'activity' portion of the workshop had on the participants was evident during the debrief and that was the greatest metric of success. Other than keeping track of time more strictly in the future, I feel that the experience is well developed, with any future adjustments being made only to the documents to assist future head facilitators in understanding the dynamics of the workshop.
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