A technique for encouraging participants to support each other in applying what they learn, that I got from Kaisu Tuominiemi, a coach at Mondragon Team Academy.
The flow:
At the end of a learning event, a course, a workshop, a class, the joker asks participants to write down one (or two) specific actions they want to take in the next two weeks, as a way to apply what they have learned.
A fast-moving concentration game in which mistakes are celebrated. I learned this from Kaisu Tuominiemi, a coach at Mondragon Team Academy.
In a circle, five to maybe ten people.
Phase One
The joker starts the game by putting her left hand on her right shoulder and saying, "one!"
The person to her right repeats the motion, saying, "two!"
This continues four more times.
This morning in a meeting with Professor Imamura Hajime from Toyo University and Jon Ander Musatadi from GLOW cooperative and Mondragon Team Academy, Jon explained the need to help people unleash their creativity using an equation.
Instead of 1+2=3, rote learning, or 1+ X = 3, where "finding the unknown" is just a matter of filling in the answer dictated by the problem, think of learning as X + Y = 3, that is, an infinity of different possible combinations, different ways to reach a given goal. As cooperative entrepreneurs, the students and coaches at MTA value innovative solutions.
I learned about this tool from Shimpei Ogawa.
In addition to being very useful for scheduling a meeting, or people's work schedules, it can be used for accountability in group work -- making a list of tasks and having the group members identify which ones they will do. You can easily visualize how well the group is distributing tasks.
I learned this game from students in an English class at Meiji University.
In this game participants add words to make a sentence under pressure of time.
Part One:
Everyone stands in a circle.
One person starts a sentence by saying one word. The next person has five seconds to add a word that continues the sentence, and so on until someone fails to add a word, or adds a word that doesn't work. When that happens -- the group screams, or makes an explosion sound, etc.
Example:
1. My
2. mother
3. was
4. born
5. in
6. a
A simple activity: ask each person to think of her/his favorite and least favorite [word, person, place, object, action, body part(?), letter, number...whatever] and share them with a partner, explaining her choice.
The sharing can be with just one person (quick), with several people in a round-robin format, with the whole group.
The sharing could be done in spoken or written form, could be drawn or pantomimed.
Compare two objects, actions, people , or texts that have nothing to do with each other
How do you compare unlike things, how deep can your comparison go, how well do you really know the objects in question?
Mash up two things in any way, or two people, or places, etc
A variation on the "Mad Libs" game.
Joker (or each participant) chooses a short text: a news item, an encyclopedia entry, a passage from a text book, a political speech, a poem, etc. S/he then removes key words or phrases, leaving blanks and a hint as to what type of word or phrase is missing (verb, noun, etc.).
Unlike the original game:
I'm sure this has been done before, but it occurred to me as well. (It's like the Kani Club activity "Words from the Heart" where the players add side commentary, sharing their true feelings out loud as if only the audience could hear them.)
Four people improvisation game.
Two people are the players, the other two are their shadows.
The two people meet each other for the first time. (The audience can choose a place beforehand.) They improvise a conversation, starting with a greeting.
This is an idea for an improvisational variation on the Love, Hate, Need activity.
Once people have identified what they Love, Hate, Need, Have, Want, Fear, and Hope, the joker hands out three cards on which are written one of the categories (love, hate, etc) to random players.
The players think for a moment, then must improvise a short (2minute or so) scene in which they act out the thing they (love, hate, need...), interacting with the others on that basis.
