How to Use this Curriculum

This curriculum for facilitating a Learning Circle on Open Pedagogy is designed to be a modular, customizable resource for users. While the topics covered here relate to open pedagogy, it is possible to drop any topic into the basic structure of the learning circle for facilitation.

What’s Included

Facilitator Session Guides and Participant Handouts
Canvas Curriculum
Templates (call for participants, emails, forms)
Slide Decks
Activities (opening, closing, temperature check, discussion)
Learning Circle Project assignment
Tool Documentation

How to Get Started

Start by reading through this document, the facilitator handouts, and the Canvas modules. This will give you a sense of the scope of what is covered in the curriculum.

Make Copies

If you’d like to edit the curriculum to better suit your institutional context, you may make copies of the Google docs by clicking File - and then Make a Copy. This will save a copy of the content to your Google Drive.

Audience

The curriculum was designed with two audiences in mind - instructor participants and instructor support participants. You can easily edit the curriculum to only address only one audience. If you’re working specifically with instructors, just delete any of the instructor support participant information you don’t need and vice versa. Or if your audience consists of both, you may use the materials as is.

What Will Your Learning Circle Cover

Decide what topics you’d like your learning circle to explore together. You can pre-select topics, or ask for suggestions in your Call For Participants. The learning circle curriculum offers structure for seven sessions on the following topics:

What is open pedagogy? - Learning Circle Kick Off, Collaborative Definitions of Open Pedagogy
Disposable vs. Renewable Assignments - What Are They? How Can You Create Renewable Assignments?
Caring for Students in the Open - exploring Consent in the Classroom, Brave Spaces, and Engaging in Care in the Open
Designing a Course with Open Pedagogy - How to Build in Accessibility, Scaffolding, and Universal Design for Learning
Open Pedagog and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) - How Does Open Pedagogy overlap with Social Justice and DEI
Tools Showcase - A Selection of Tools that Can Be Used to Create Open Pedagogy Experiences in the Classroom
Show and Tell - Participants show off their Learning Circle Projects

Call For Participants

Once you’ve identified your target audience and the content of your learning circle, you’ll want to develop your Call for Participants. Consider whether you’ll be doing targeted recruitment of specific departments or colleges, or if you’ll be doing a general call across your institution. Consider how many sessions you have capacity to facilitate, how long each session will be, and whether you’ll be meeting in person or virtually. You’ll also want to develop your selection criteria. How will you select participants to join the learning circle? Decide whether you’ll want them to create a Learning Circle Project in tandem with the weekly sessions.

Sessions

Sessions are designed to run for 1 hour. Each one follows the same structure:

Welcome
Agenda
Temperature Check Activity

How are folks feeling?

Opening Activity

A fun community building question that helps folks get to know each other better

Presentation of the week’s topic
Discussion activity related to the week’s topic
Temperature Check

How are folks feeling after the session?

Closing Activity

What one thing they’ll be taking away with them from this week’s session?

Wrap Up and What’s Next

Details for next week, assignment reminders, and prework information

Virtual

For virtual sessions, create a recurring meeting invite with the meeting software your institution uses and invite participants.

Refer to the Facilitator Handouts for each session
Build out your activities
Make sure to establish how folks can participate: cameras on/off, chat only, chat and voice?
Will you call on people? Will you ask people to share more context about their poll answers if they’re comfortable?
Ask participants for consent before recording learning circle sessions.

In Person

There are a few differences in what you’ll need if you decide to run the learning circle in person versus virtually.

You’ll want to identify where you’ll meet and book the room if necessary.
Consider what technology you have access to in the location you’re holding sessions in. Do folks need to bring their own technology?
Are you providing food (lunch, light snacks, beverages)?
Still use the temperature check, opening, discussion, and closing activities. You could still facilitate these through your favorite polling software, or run the activities as questions to start the group off with.
Ask participants for how they feel comfortable communicating throughout the sessions - do they want to be called on? Raise their hands? You want to build out solid community norms at the very beginning of the learning circle.
Prepare examples ahead of time for each session topic, so you can break the silence and get conversation flowing.

Polling

The learning circle activities are designed to be used with polling software. Pick your favorite. In the pilot learning circle we used Mentimeter. You’ll find the prompts for these in the Activities folder.

Emails

The curriculum provides email templates for the following:

Welcome to Learning Circle
Sessions 1-7
Wrap Up Email 1 - for after session 7
Wrap Up Email 2 - for after everyone’s turned in their Learning Circle Project

The weekly emails cover takeaways from the previous week (not applicable for session 1), what the next session’s topic is, any session materials, any resources you’ve promised, and an attachment with the poll results. The last email also expresses gratitude to participants for their time and effort.

Assessment

Each week, the closing activities help you do some light assessment of how the sessions are going.
Build final check in - in your favorite polling software - for the last session that asks for feedback about the whole experience (see the activities in Session 7).
Survey participants at the end of the learning circle experience with the evaluation form template