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This month our team engaged in a World Café, a strategy created by Brown and Isaacs (2005), which uses rotating groups of conversations in a café like environment where people work together to construct new knowledge and ideas.
We had four areas of our practice that we sought to improve and developed open-ended questions to prompt critical reflection in these. They were:
In order to answer these, the room was divided into four tables, each with had a different question posed on the tablecloth, groups spent 20-30 minutes at each; conversing, jotting down notes and doodles to answer the question before moving onto the next. A ‘host’ remained at each table during transitions; with the role of transferring previously discussed ideas to new conversations.
By following the World Café Principles, we were able to draw upon everyone’s wonderful ideas to improve our practice in a range of National Quality Framework. These involved setting as meaningful context (seeking to improve our daily practices at FELC in specific areas), creating a hospital space (educators were warmly welcomed, ‘World Café’ music played softly in the background, native plants sat in glass jars on the tables), exploring questions that matter (we related these directly to our Quality Improvement Plan), encourage everyone’s contributions (we warmed up with some fun ice-breakers), connect diverse perspectives (Lucky us – we have a great diversity of cultures and backgrounds amongst our team of professionals), listen together for insights (We practice Tribes Agreements at our staff meetings to ensure we attentively listen to others and actively practice mutual respect), and lastly, we shared collective discoveries (one person from each table shared the ideas that had sprouted at their table through the evening).
This was a wonderful strategy to gather ideas from each of our team members, the room was buzzing with ideas and conversations. We now have a clear vision of how we can improve in the areas we chose. We have seen some of these blossom over the recent weeks since our World Café; our community garden is coming to life, our weekly staff communications are helping everyone keep up to date with general ‘going ons’, we are more mindful of being sustainable in our daily practices, in particular when engaging in arts and crafts, and we have been using the natural resources in our outdoors as a resource for intentional teaching. For more information on World Café, see Brown and Isaacs website http://www.theworldcafe.com/ where there are wonderful examples of how this strategy has been used by leaders around the world.