BCcampus Professional Learning is unleashing the power of Liberating Structures

When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Are you ready to break out, increase participation, boost creative energy in your meetings, gatherings, classrooms and workshops? If you’ve answered YES, then join us for the Liberating Structures Workshop.

BCcampus Professional Learning and the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UBC are collaborating together to bring you Liberating Structures!

BCcampus and CTLT are excited to co-host this event and bring Liberating Structures to our colleagues in B.C. We’d like to extend an enormous thanks to Kele Fleming and the CTLT team at UBC for their generosity. This is shaping up to be a great example of inter-institutional sharing of our human and other institutional resources for the benefit of everyone in B.C. Higher Ed education.

Seriously fun methods to engage and work together

Liberating Structures is a toolkit, with 33 facilitation strategies that can be customized and used in your classrooms, meetings, strategic planning sessions, workshops, presentations, and more. These strategies are open, inclusive and designed to help unleash, engage and harvest the best ideas from everyone. In the workshop, you will learn how to choose, facilitate, and sequence Liberating Structures for your individual facilitation challenges and contexts.

Here are some examples of applying Liberating Structures to challenges in higher education:

Designing engaging meetings and classes – online and face-to-face – with productive endpoints in mind (Min Specs, Design Storyboard, Purpose To Practice)
Amplifying both love of learning and practical skill development (Wicked Questions, 25/10 Crowdsourcing)
Working productively with a difference, not sweeping it under the rug (Conversation Cafe, 15% Solutions, What/So What/Now What?)
Creating an inclusive culture within a very diverse campus (TRIZ, Discovery and Action Dialogue, Appreciative Interview, Ecocycle)
Shaping next steps together with faculty, staff, student, administration fully engaged (Discovery and Action Dialogue, Ecocycle, P2P)
Preparing for operating in a future in which public funding is decreasing and serious competition is increasing (Critical Uncertainties)

Facilitator

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Keith McCandless holds a Masters in Management of Human Services,from Brandeis University in Boston and a BA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Mr. McCandless is the co-founder of Liberating Structures and will be leading the facilitation of this incredible workshop. This is the first and only time that he will be coming to Vancouver, B.C. to teach the Liberating Structures strategies, so you don’t want to miss this opportunity.

Who should attend?

Faculty, Instructors, Teachers, Learning Designers, Leaders – all of us who are called on to facilitate learning, meetings, sessions, groups, presentations, workshops, processes, communication and change. We intend to focus on higher education contexts, but colleagues from other sectors (e.g., government, health care, private) are welcome and will benefit!

You will be surprised by how simple and easy these are for anyone to use.

Notable quote

“Liberating Structures have changed how I facilitate everything. Once you start using these strategies, you realize how incredibly flexible they are, how much easier it is to plan sessions with productive endpoints in mind, and how much more fun and engaging sessions are for participants. Try one – you’ll see!” – Tracy Kelly, Manager, Professional Learning