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The School of Health Sciences recently held their inaugural LEGO® Serious Play session.
The event came after recent investment into resources and facilitator training to accommodate the adoption of what is a modern and vibrant teaching and learning tool.
LEGO® Serious Play is a complex and well-established process that uses LEGO® to develop complex models to help teams with strategic development.
The initiative forms part of the School’s IPL curriculum, in which educators aim to provide students from all health science disciplines with the opportunity to learn alongside, about and from each other via a range of small group activities.
Topics covered are all relevant to modern healthcare and include a session devoted to leadership. Previously this required students to bring in an artefact which represented leadership to them for sharing and discussion.
In the LEGO® Serious Play launch, students were asked to use LEGO® to create a 3-D model that represented leadership to them. They were then asked to share their models, discuss them with the rest of the group and see if they could form connections between the different creations.
Although the session was not strictly speaking a “serious play” workshop, it did draw on similar elements with all students building models before using them to stimulate discussion and explore different ideas.
The inaugural launch of the initiative produced some amazing models including boats, towers, cars and a range of leadership scenarios.
Student evaluation of the session was overwhelmingly positive. 94% of participants said that they enjoying taking part whilst 87% of them agreed that it had taught them something about leadership.
91% of participants also indicated that LEGO® had helped them to engage with others in their group.
Dr Rebecca Rylance, Dean of the School of Health Sciences, said: "It was great to see our students undertaking interprofessional learning through the use of LEGO® Serious Play, building models to express the attributes which they believe to be present or necessary in a healthcare leader.
"It was lots of fun with some very impressive models and some revealing insights about modern leadership. We're already looking forward to hosting more sessions like this in the future."
It was clear that the hands-on nature of the session stimulated creativity and also boosted engagement with group work.
If you are interested in using the LEGO® resources in your teaching to enhance group work activities or as Serious Play in team building and strategic development then please contact the new School Lego Serious Play group via: Dr Pete Bridge (Senior Lecturer and Serious LEGO® Play Facilitator) bridgep@liverpool.ac.uk