LEARN THE LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® METHOD
LEGO Serious Play Blog
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitation Training and Certification

Building betterfacilitators

Learning to facilitate LEGO Serious Play Online - By Dr Rebekah Wilson

The blog post below was written by SeriousWork graduate Dr Rebekah Wilson who works at Exeter University. Rebekah first published this post on the Exeter University Incubator website and we are grateful for her permission to re-post it here.

The Education Incubator Serious Fun, Serious Play, Serious Skills project awarded six bursaries to support Lego Serious Play Facilitation Training across the University of Exeter. In this blog, one of the bursary recipients, Dr Rebekah Welton shares her journey.


I am a Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religion. As a relative newcomer to the world of teaching and lecturing, I am particularly keen to try new and exciting ways of delivering content and assessments for my students. So when I heard about the opportunity to apply for a bursary to train as a Lego Serious Play facilitator, I was immediately intrigued. However, I did not have much time to put together the application video as I was about to go on annual leave for a week camping in Wales! I decided to make the most of the gorgeous landscapes and recorded my application video in various locations from Great Orme’s Head to Llanberis! Fortunately, the sight of me in walking gear did not put the panel off, and I was selected to receive the bursary for Lego Serious Play facilitation training. I was delighted!


In normal circumstances, Lego Serious Play takes place face-to-face, with all participants handling shared piles of Lego, but this was, of course not taking place under normal circumstances. So instead, each of us received an array of Lego in the post to use in our own homes via Zoom.


Our brilliant trainer, Sean, taught us to use the bricks as metaphors, building models to express our ideas and anxieties about any topic imaginable. We had to learn to listen carefully to the stories that each participant told about the models, and in asking further probing questions about why they chose a red brick instead of yellow, we were led to unexpected but insightful conversations about each model and what they represented.


Image
Once we got the knack of facilitating the building of individual models online and using them for reflection, we then learnt to amalgamate the individual models into a one large shared model. I think we were all surprised by just how effective this was for drawing together a variety of ideas into one narrative, mediated by the Lego bricks.


On the second day of training we got into the nitty-gritty work of planning Lego Serious Play sessions for the particular needs of a specific group; a seminar on a particular module, a department of academic colleagues, or an executive group, for example. This is where we realised that the efficacy of Lego Serious Play sessions relies on the planning and the thoughtful implementation of clear, accurate directions for model building, and the subsequent reflection.

It is not simply a case of asking participants to play with bricks. The task must be framed carefully to yield the best results. Nevertheless, the capacity and flexibility that this playful pedagogy provides for enhancing learning and communication are immense, and I am eagerly anticipating delivering my first Lego session to my students in a couple of weeks. When face to face, hands-on Lego sessions become safe to carry out, Sean will be visiting us on campus to teach us how to run even bigger Lego Serious Play sessions and build ‘system models’.
I feel so inspired by the training I received. The ways in which this method of learning and creating shared visions can be used appears to be multifarious. I am fully behind the aims of Education Incubator to integrate Lego Serious Play into the University’s toolkit of common practices in teaching and academic development. If you have the opportunity to attend a session, or to also receive facilitation training at a later date, I wouldn’t hesitate to take part!


NOTE: Thanks for letting us share your write up Rebekah. We should also note that without the pioneering work being done by Dr Holly Henderson at Exeter University expanding the use of LEGO Serious Play at Exeter University would not be happening!

Show more posts

Recent entries
Legal Geek and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®
Blog Post by SeriousWork Graduate and ProMet associate Vics Bradley. ...
Workshops Work Podcast - part 1
Myriam Hadnes runs the Workshops Work Podcast, and in episode 136 she ...
乐高 工作法 实战手册 - LEGO Work Method Practical Manual
Well this is exciting news, our first book SERIOUSWORK, first published in ...
Back to School: LEGO Serious Play @ United World College South East Asia
A (wonderful) graduate story by Liam Isaac - Head of Digital ...
What would you do if you had all the free time in the world?
This is a (brilliant) guest blog post from SeriousWork ...
Report from Build Level 3 System Model ONLINE training pilot
We love designing and testing ideas before we launch new techniques or ...
Podcast - The Lego Serious Play Facilitation Method with Sean Blai‪r‬
William Corless from YellowWood recently made a podcast with Sean. From the ...
Price Rise for ONLINE training
You may remember in January we gave you a taste of some of our plans for ...
What to expect from SeriousWork in the year ahead
As we say goodbye (and I’m sure for some of us ‘good riddance’!) to ...
All children are born artists by Sirte Pihlaja
We need a more experimental, startup mentality to disrupt our old ways of ...
How COVID-19 created our new book ONLINE
Here's the back story to our new book. March 2020 was set to be a busy ...
Learning to facilitate LEGO Serious Play Online - By Dr Rebekah Wilson
The blog post below was written by SeriousWork graduate Dr Rebekah Wilson ...
Tosin Interviews Sean - A Podcast on LEGO Serious Play, including some of the secrets of #OnlineLSP
Tosin Adebisi is, accodoring to his mum, "a specialist in human-centered ...
A message to graduates of all LSP trainings. Yes you can facilitate LEGO Serious Play online :)
El Capitan also known as El Cap, is a vertical rock formation in Yosemite ...
Virtual LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® – Is Online Shared Model Building possible?
The LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® community is blessed with innovators (like the ...
After LEGO Serious Play Faciliation Training - SeriousWork Graduates
We recently asked some of our graduates to tell us what they had done after ...
Remembering meaning - 5 years later...
The official LEGO website has been going through an update of late, and we ...
LEGO, SERIOUS PLAY, the Minifigure and the Brick and Knob configurations are trademarks of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this website. SeriousWork respects and aligns with the the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® trademark guidelines

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® © 2023 The LEGO Group
SERIOUSWORK uses the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method described in the LEGO Group Open Source Guide made available by LEGO under a Creative Commons licence ‘Attribution Share Alike’

©SERIOUSWORK 2023. SeriousWork and ProMeet are a part of Serious Outcomes Ltd a UK based company number 11115058.