Lego Play for Higher Education Academy Recognition

My teaching philosophy,
expressed in Lego.

Today I took part in a Lego Serious Play session run for staff at the Australian National University in Canberra. This was conducted by Dr Stephen Dann, who customized the session to help those working on their Higher Education Academy Professional Recognition.

We were each provided with a pack of Lego bricks and taken through a sequence of quick exercises, where we each built something and then discussed what we had built. This was a very carefully structured process, starting with concrete exercises to get us used to working with the bricks, through increasingly abstract discussing of our teaching and supervision practices.



This may sound like a frivolous exercise of adults playing with children's blocks. However, it was a way for us to reflect and discuss what we do with teaching and research. It turned out to be a very intense and at times emotional process. In a few hours of "play" I discovered aspects of how I think about teaching which I had not realized in my previous three and a half years of formal graduate education. I am tempted to submit a Lego stop-motion movie as my HEA application, in place of the usual text document. ;-)


There is a 22 page "Introduction to LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ®". No fee needs to be paid to Lego to use the "Method", but obviously they would like you to buy their Starter Kits of Blocks. In addition there are are books on the method and scholarly papers.