Playful Leadership is... at the PLA meeting November 2022

We had one of our biannual Playful Learning Association meetings last week in Huddersfield and I did a "Playful Leadership is..." exercise, so sharing the results here for convenience!

One group stamped a "headline" thing about Playful Leadership on one side of the card, then a separate group used that as a prompt for more detail on the other side. (Limited time, space, materials for the "headline" phrase or word, more time and space to write on the back!)

All the cards can be seen in a Google Photos album, but I've also tried to transcribe the text below

Playful Leadership is:	Explanation:
Subversive	It may subvert roles And structures And expectations And processes And boundaries And relations And pedagogy And play
Dangerous	So run, hide, tell
Projecting play into work	Focusses on the playful aspect of work Has a strong intent Projecting = role modelling
Egalitarian	Power balances, mutual respect between leader and team – creates space for creativity. Everyone takes ownership for the direction. Choose your own adventure (but how does this work to … illegible)
A state of mind	A Playful Attitude. Agency – you choose to. You have to want to be playful. Persuasion – changing the state of mind of others.
Messyness	Messy talk creates opportunity for emerging ideas. (Article was referenced in explanation for messy talk)
Creating space	A chance to breathe, pause, & reflect. Mindfully, socially, and bodily.
Set of symbols – multiple ?, !, &, #	Questioning, inclusive, and staying sharp.
The witches brew in the cauldron of knowledge	“Add some spice” to existing practice. Stirring up habits and stagnant practice.
The unexpected	Who is it unexpected for? Facilitator needs to be comfortable. Breaks auto pilot of bad teaching. Unexpected changes in boundaries / changes who is “in charge”?
Striking a pose.	Being unashamed of your authentic self (ridicule is nothing to be scared of)
Boring (also included stamps of ice creams and flying hearts)	About making the boring not boring. Because ice cream makes everything not boring. The BORING button.
Inclusion	Everyone is invited and involved in the play.

The last round I added an extra limiter for, which they struggled with more, limiting the cards to a particular aspect of playful leadership, either Staff Development, Recruitment, or Performance Management:

Playful Leadership (in recruitment) is.. NEW	Eyes Perspectives Backgrounds Creative approaches Challenges Possibilities
Playful Leadership (in recruitment) is.. RO(U)LE BREAKING	The power of playfulness is to disrupt, transform, add ambiguity to rules/roles – thus breaking standards. Emphasising the boundary breaking in recruitment processes exploring rules/roles as dynamic / flexible.
Playful Leadership (in recruitment) is.. CREATIVE ASSESSMENT	Introducing exciting / fun / collaborative / interactive tasks to assess key competencies for role. Setting expectations that unexpected / imaginative / unique responses are valued. Encouraging different behaviours to be demonstrated. [Is it exclusionary to those less playful?]
Playful Leadership (in Performance Management) is.. CORE CONDITIONS (making sense of things, Rogers)	Go back in time and fix the things you didn’t get right the first time. (Note – this was verbally explained that they were playing with the idea of Steve Rogers in the Avengers films.)
Playful Leadership (in Performance Management) is.. STORY	Their career path is their own story. Every story has a beginning and an end. Where the person is now, where they want to be / should be. Performance management is how to get there – see other card! (Note – this refers to “collective imagination card)
Playful Leadership (in Performance Management) is.. COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION	Joint negotiating on the persons destination and steps to get there – see also: STORY
Playful Leadership (in Staff Development) is… Symbols only for this one, mustache, kitten/dog faces, ice cream	Shrug Stamp.
Playful Leadership (in Staff Development) is… Symbols only for this one, 2 mustaches with a question mark in the middle.	Interactively differently. Even during Movember.

Huddersfield Escape Room Workshop

I ran another Educational Escape Room workshop in Huddersfield last week, at the lovely Heritage Quay! It was a full day of following a set process to create some prototype educational escape room ideas - videos of the prototypes are here to watch.

Amy has blogged about the workshop properly (rather than this quick reflection & video link from me!).

Thank you to everyone who took part and worked hard throughout the day :-)

I collected some feedback at the end of the day, and I was particularly interested in whether I should let attendees play some examples, or whether that would influence them too much (so they'd copy and get less out of it!). The general feeling seemed to be that they'd appreciate examples to play, perhaps later in the session (so it didn't influence too much!), so I'll have to think about how I can tweak future workshops accordingly.

Lots of open workshops!

I've got lots of (open) workshops coming up! All subject to having enough people book on them, but we have:

Teaching Tips for Librarians, Friday afternoon, 10th March, Sheffield.
https://shefftips.eventbrite.co.uk
This covers some of the basic teaching mechanics and is aimed at librarians. We look at: Learning Objectives; Lesson Plans; Assessment; Evaluation and some related issues. We'll give practical help, tips, interventions, and templates to use in your own teaching sessions, with particular emphasis on "one-shot" teaching sessions and active learning interventions. It will run as a highly interactive workshop.

Making Educational Escape Rooms, All day Thursday, 13th April, Huddersfield.
https://hudescape.eventbrite.co.uk
A full day workshop making educational escape room style activities, aimed at anyone interested in using escape room ideas for teaching.
The day will be hands on, with a process scaffolded to enable attendees to work in groups to create a prototype of an escape room style activity. By the end of the day, all attendees (in their groups) will have sketched out an escape room style activity and started to create the puzzles that make up that activity.

Creative Teaching Double Bill, All day or half day Friday, 5th May, Manchester.
https://mancdouble.eventbrite.co.uk
Both these workshops are aimed at anyone interested in creative and playful approaches to teaching, particularly in FE and HE sectors. 
In the morning will be:
Picture This! Using the ‘Writing Essays by Pictures’ approach to teaching academic practice
Writing Essays by Pictures is a workbook for students who need help with researching and writing their first evidence based research essay for university. It explains academic practice that often remains hidden to students through everyday analogies and offers activities that allow students to explore the research and writing process in the step-by-step way of painting by numbers.
All attendees will receive a copy of 'Writing Essays by Pictures' (list price £15).

In the afternoon we have:
Making (non-digital) educational games
In this afternoon workshop, we will follow a carefully scaffolded process to prototype educational games. Working in small groups, you will create a prototype game and share it with your fellow participants in just 3 hours.This process can then be followed after the event to quickly and easily create educational games and playful learning experiences for your learners in future.

"Sneaky Cards" and the workplace

I've really liked the idea of Sneaky Cards since I first saw them, and I've already planned challenge type cards for attendees at the i2c2 conference next year.
I've also been pondering how to make my Uni workplace more playful and have been trying little bits and pieces.
These two came together last week at the Playful Learning SIG meeting  when we were talking about this sort of stuff... so I've put a proposal to our Senior Management Team in Computing and Library Services (CLS - the bit of the uni I work in), to run with the idea..