• The fun fed - a collective that plays fun games for adults,
• My list of games - my list of games that I’ve found or invented,
• Cheapass games - a company that sells the rules to games with no pieces,

Sadler Heath is an organisation established for those of us who want to take responsibility for their own long-term personal development and thought leadership by working together with like-minded people in a safe and supportive environment.

This workshop will be about using games for learning:

• games are a powerful tool for learning,  as playing a game creates a great learning environment,
• the mindset that people have when they play a game is consistent with learning; engaged, open, looking for connections, enjoying themselves,
• the rules and object of the game can link with the learning material,
• games involve multiple senses and patterns of thinking, and so involve different types of learners,
• games are a great ice breaker and allow experiential understanding of the topic in discussion,
• games have an element of ambiguity, and so enable different people to learn
• different things.

Workshop structure:

• we will get curious about games, finding out how and why they work as learning tool,
• we will use this knowledge to practice facilitating games,
• we will move on to create our own games that support an idea.

The music project will first run for 12 weeks; working to build trust, rapport and musical skills. The project will conclude by producing a finished track. You can download the project proposal here: hip hop project

Sam Alty is a professional musician and performer based in South London. He teaches improvisation and guitar.

COVO is an educational charity based in Southwark since 1999. COVO provides tailor-made projects, training and consultancy that support schools and organisations to address conflict, disaffection and underachievement in education and the workplace.

Young people can practice indoors and get to grips with the general concepts and ideas of graffiti before going outside and painting.

The instructions to make your own virtual graffiti system are published and are freely available on the instructables website.

The main point I wanted to cover in this session was how important it is for the listener to check their understanding of a communication. This simple skill prevents many common communication issues from arising.

We played a version of the ‘broken telephone game’, where people whispered the message around the circle and we see how close they are to the original transmission at the end. We then played it again but this time the listeners related back to the whisperers what they had heard.

Next we moved on to play a variation on a game from last week, where we role-played various scenarios to practise communication. The key point was to cleanly and fully summarise your partner’s communication.

This marked the end of the workshop topics, and we spent the remaining 20 minutes doing feedback; questionnaires, the mindset dot feedback from the first workshop, and a few people recorded some video clips as well.

We’re just starting to look at the results of the feedback, but some of it is very promising. Here is a composite photo of the mindset feedback that we ran before the first workshop and after the last. It shows people’s beliefs in their ability to change various aspects about themselves. After the last workshop people showed a marked increase in their beliefs about being able to change!

We had a QA session and drew a mindmap that collected our ideas about motivation. We considered last week’s question about building motivation in areas where we are not naturally attracted to. This grew into a discussion about being motivated in school, the use of praise and rewards.

We then moved on to the communication part of the workshop. We started by playing a game where blindfolded people were led to a part of the room and had to be guided back to a chair by their sighted partners. The aim of the game was to get people into the space of really listening and being guided to a destination. In communication we can often assume we know what the other person means, and we may miss their real message.

We had a QA session on ‘what is good communication like’ and had some interesting answers, including some great metaphors like airport control towers and airline pilots. I introduced the idea of the listener summarising the communication back to the talker to check that the communication was on target.

To practice this, we split into 3s and each 3 rotated around the roles of coach, talker and listener. It was the listener’s job to clearly summarise what the talker’s issue was.

The homework question this week was “Where would better communications be useful in your life?”

We continued from last week’s creativity theme with a look at conformity. Often conformity is useful (driving on the left), but in solving problems (as one of our participants put it), if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

One way of challenging conformity is to turn it on its head. We played a game where everyone wrote down an issue that bothered them, and we put these into a hat. The hat went round and everyone pulled a paper and had to ‘turn it on its head’. So if I had written traffic jams, then the person pulling that out could have said “traffic jams are good because they slow the cars down and there will be less accidents”.

We used a physical feedback method so I could get an understanding of how people found the workshops so far in terms of value (people said medium to high), pace (slow to medium) and fun (medium to fun).

We then moved on to the second part of the workshop: motivation. To start we played a game of paper, scissors, stone to pick who would go first. The 2 teams took a story about motivation and had 5 minutes to prepare a bit of theatre to illustrate the story. This was a lot of fun!

We then split into small groups to discuss how motivation can be increased in schools - an answer a lot of us are interested in! Suggestions from the groups included:

• using praise, allow everyone to solve problems in their own way,
• finding a way to make the learner need the understanding,
• for the learner to know why they are learning,
• find a way for the learner to experience in different ways the material.

The homework question that we finished on was “How can we get motivated to do things we don’t want to do naturally - and is this even possible?”

The group got into groups of 3; a coach, a listener and a talker. The talker told the listener about a challenge they were facing, and the talker tried out different forms of encouragement. The aim was to experience what it is like to give and recieve communication that puts us into the growth mindset (I can do this), as apposed to a fixed mindset (this is too difficult, I’ll give up).

This exercise was inspired by an experiment performed by Carol Dweck, that showed the way we communicate has an important effect on how we perform and behave subsequently.

We then moved on the the second part of the workshop - creativity. We started by solving the problem: how can you build a free standing tower of a certain height that is stable enough to be moved? I supplied each team with a can, 2 peices of cardboard, some string and a length of sticky tape. In fact, no group met the challenge completely, but the exercise showed that there are many ways of solving a problem.

This illustrates one of Roger von Oech’s ideas about creativity - always look for the 2nd right answer. Each team tried to solve the problem in a different way. It’s only by coming up with lots of ideas that we can choose the best. I also raised the point that schools often encourage people to think that there is only 1 right answer; tests, questions etc.

We had a group discussion about creativity and how it is useful. I documented our discussion as a mindmap:

I presented another idea from Roger’s book: a whack on the side of the head; the usefulness of ambiguity. We split into groups and each group came up with an problem that we could solve with some creative ideas. Each group chose a random word and had to use this as a ‘jumping off’ point to solve their challenges.

Finally I asked people to consider the question: “where could you use more creativity in your life right now” as homework for the next session.