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We recently organised our first 🔥Feel The Learn🔥 session and were so happy and grateful with the results. The plan is now to continue with these events on a fortnightly basis and try to get more people involved.
But what is 🔥Feel The Learn🔥?
One night we were trying to think of ways to give new people a chance to try out the Curio Class learning methodology.
Eventually we decided it would be best to put on a regular learning event which uses most of the principles and elements of the Curio Cycle, but with a much shorter time-frame. Although this isn't ideal, as it means the activities are a bit squished, it's a worthwhile compromise for our goal of exposing more people to the Curio Cycle way of learning.
Unlike the full-scale Curio Cycle, these sessions need to be structured in a way which is able to scale. For the time-being this means that every event will have a single topic which everyone will learn. Then no matter how many people attend the session, we can split them into cohorts and each cohort can use the interactive whiteboard to work through the activities.
Below is the template used for the first 🔥Feel The Learn🔥.
In the future it would be better if each cohort could decide their own topic and still work through the activities. However, with the casual nature of the attendees, it would be really hard to get a cohort of random people to decide on a joint topic. For now, our solution for this is to create multiple Feel The Learn 'channels', based on different interests or industries and then ask the community for topic ideas. The first 'channel' we've created is about Agile, as that's Becky's home turf.
Probably the biggest aspect which needed to change between the main Curio Cycle and these Feel The Learn events was the requirement for participants to stay in the same cohort throughout a learning journey. This is really important in the Curio Cycle methodology, as the cohort is supposed to grow together over time, make improvements to the way they learn and support each other in their quest to become experts. However this requirement just wouldn't have been practical for these more casual sessions. Although we suspect the group which participated in the first Feel The Learn would happily work together again.
So how did it go?
It went really well!
The first session was on 28th November and although we didn't have a large number of people participate, we did have six which was enough for a cohort. It was held virtually via Meetup and Zoom, and we used Mural to host an interactive whiteboard with activities taken from our book.
As this Feel The Learn 'channel' is Agile themed, the topic was the Daily Scrum. After a brief introduction from us, the group was largely left alone to work through the activities as a cohort. Below is a collage of their work on the activities.
These sessions currently run for 1.5 hours, which gives us enough time for introductions and icebreakers, before allowing around 20 mins per activity. Again this isn't ideal as it means the activities are a bit rushed, but it's a necessary compromise in order to get people to attend on a casual basis.
So what now?
Well, the plan is to keep doing these 🔥Feel The Learn🔥 sessions on a fortnightly basis and trying to reach lots of new people with our Curio Cycle learning methodology. The first one was a success and the participants gave lots of great feedback, as well as some learning points, so we've been encouraged to keep going with it and improving the format.
If you want to join the Meetup group and attend future 🔥Feel The Learn🔥 events you can sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/feel-the-learn-agile/
If you'd like to run this 🔥Feel The Learn🔥 session for your own group, you can download the blank template and instructions here: https://www.curioclass.co.uk/shop