 Good afternoon, thank you for joining us this afternoon. Today I'm joined with Amber Taylor-Smith who's joining us from Durham and she's going to be talking about her presentation over to you, How the Thinking Environment Builds Community Respect and Priority in a Virtual Community of Practice. So I'm going to pass you over to Amber. Hi there, thank you. So yes, that's exactly what I'm going to be talking to you about today. How the Thinking Environment Builds Community Respect and Priority. So first of all, to introduce myself, my name's Amber Taylor-Smith and I'm a student at the University of Huddersfield. This was my dissertation and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I enjoy writing it. So I did my dissertation on a collective called Joy FE. Joy FE are a group of practitioners within FE that come together to do various different things and they come together to think effectively. So in the town they come together to think it's called an Ideas Room. So what is an Ideas Room? An Ideas Room looks like a Zoom room twice a week on a Wednesday night and a Friday morning and what happens is you come together and names are put in the chat function and you will go around in the order that names are put in the chat saying over to you after each person has spoken. The first question is how are you? And the second question is what do you want to think about today? How do you want to progress your ideas? Now you can come without an idea or you can come with an idea. If you come without then you're there to listen but you're not there to just listen because the Thinking Environment means that you are an active listener. So if you do have an idea you automatically become an Idea Sponsor. Now if you have a group of around 20 practitioners coming together maybe about five ideas is an optimum number because what will then happen is that we will have breakout rooms that are created as a result of these ideas and then the next round is which breakout room do you want to go into to think about an idea with this person? In the breakout rooms the Idea Sponsor will then talk a little bit further about their idea in more depth and then that will evoke freshest thinking within the people in the ideas room that are there to listen. So if you're there to listen you're listening attentively you're listening skillfully but you're also there to respond and when you're responding you're responding with your freshest thinking. So after about 55 minutes in total you'll come back together and have a what's live in new round which is just a way to transition out of the space. So this is an application of the Thinking Environment I'm going to talk a little bit further more in depth about the Thinking Environment later but it's also part of a rhizomatic movement. Now a rhizomatic movement is an anti-hierarchical collaborative anti-competitive manner of being and the idea that most companies, most organisations work in a very hierarchical way almost like a tree in that they have roots as workers, trunks as middle management branches as sort of your directors and then your leaves as you see yours whereas in nature the rhizomatic movement is mirrored in a rhizome such as a blue bell where you've got one you've got another one and then you've got another one and another one and they pop up equally and they are very very much each other's equal and that's how they grow they grow outwards rather than upwards. And with a rhizomatic movement you also have something called lines of flight where almost like how blue bells sort of multiply you will go off in different directions as a consequence of the core group. So the Thinking Environment. The Thinking Environment has 10 components these components are attention, equality, ease, appreciation, encouragement, feelings, information, difference which was formally diversity, incisive questions and place and these were coined by a woman called Nancy Klein back in 1999 in her seminal book Time to Think. Now these components are held very carefully within the ideas room which introduces a few rules so when once you come into the ideas room the host will sort of guide you through the rules which help to hold the components in place. These rules are role rank and ego left at the door which is a practice of equality and they are not to interrupt one another which is a feeling of appreciation and attention and not to interrupt one another is probably the most important rule of the Thinking Environment. It allows people to really sort of evoke their freshest thinking, their independent critical thinking without without knowing that they're going to be interrupted by somebody else and it also helps to really attune the listening skills of the listeners. So those are the main rules of the Thinking Environment no interruption and role rank and ego left at the door. So moving on. To contextualise the ideas room I looked at Cutie's practice and the idea that they are intersectional and this was mirrored in my findings. I looked at third place which is Oldenburg the idea that people come to a place where they feel comfortable that is outside of their familial units and outside of their work units as well. In order to discuss philosophical issues, political issues, issues that are really important to them but they feel that they can't bring to a place where they would automatically reside. I looked at intra-organisational working and silo working. Now intra-organisational working is really important with the ideas room because people come together from all different walks of life within FE under the umbrella of joy FE and they work together to share each other's knowledge which leads us onto knowledge sharing and then I looked at knowledge sharing specifically in a community model and the idea that knowledge is public and good and the idea with the ideas room is that people get to talk to each other about what they're thinking about and what their freshest thinking is. They do not give advice that is a very important rule of the ideas room where they do not give advice and it is purely about what you are thinking about at that specific time and the idea that knowledge is a public good meaning that everybody has access to this knowledge regardless of what their role or rank is. I looked further into the rhizomatic theory which is to lose on guitar. As I've spoken about rhizomatic theory there's also something called diffractive practice and the idea that it's in line with the lines of flight. Diffractive practice is different practices that pop up around the core group so that's something that we will find as I talk about findings later on that different practices have cropped up as a result of the ideas room and I've spoken about the thinking environment. So my research questions were how does the application of the thinking environment influence the experience of virtual community of practice? So what I really wanted to know was what set apart the ideas room from any other virtual community of practice and to what extent of the experience is experience of community built using the thinking environment? So I was really interested in how people felt if they were part of a community or not and how does the thinking environment practice sit within a rhizomatic movement? So I wanted to know about that diffractive practice and about those lines of flight. So I took a phenomenological approach and so I conducted semi-structured interviews and these interviews were held in sort of three sections sort of looking at what had happened, meaning making and then critical thinking about the meaning making that happened. I had a convenience sampling of allowing people to come to me so people responded to an open call on Twitter so in the ideas room you are encouraged to enter your Twitter handle into the chat function before the ideas room begins as a way of building community within the within the Twitter sphere and around JFE on Twitter. So I used that community that was already built in order to sort of access my sampling. My ethics were in line with Barrow 2018 and I used thematic analysis to analyze my findings. My findings primarily were around five different aspects so I looked at equality in the rhizomatic movement, networking and the lonely professional, looking at more subject-specific vocational communities of practice, looking more in-depth into third space and also I was met with some skepticism and rule. So I'm going to look a little bit more in-depth into each of these with some quotes I've got from my participants. So first of all equality in the rhizomatic movement. So with the practice of equality people cited that Roarank and Ego being left the door was the most important aspect of the thinking environment for them and the ideas room. I think about a half of my participants cited that as the most important thing that kept them come back each time to feel that they were equal, to feel that they were being listened to equally. So the thinking environment really sort of engages people to up their listening skills, to really sort of hone in on what people are saying, how they are saying it, and to think critically about that, but then also to think to sort of craft your response in the moment, rather than as you are listening. But the idea of equality has helped to build the rhizomatic movement is the idea that people feel that they are equal within the space that has helped them to either come back or to contribute to the wider movement. So Joy Fee is a collective, has a broadcast, it has a magazine, it has an Instagram account. There are so many different facets of Joy Fee now that have been built as a result of people coming to the ideas room and wanting more. So people have also felt that because of that feeling of equality that they experience within the ideas room, they have gone on to recreate the ideas room format within their classrooms, within their work environments. And it's been really interesting to see how far people have gone with the ideas room format. People have created podcasts off the back of ideas that they've had within the ideas room. People have created whole new communities of practice because of the ideas room. And this is all diffractive practice, this is all lines of fly that have stemmed from the ideas room. So the next concept that I want to talk about is networking and the lonely professional. Now half of my participants were PhD students and also working within FE. Now the PhD students particularly found that they were very isolated within their, within their studies. And the people that were not PhD students also found that they were quite isolated at work. And they felt that they wanted to join this community of practice because they wanted sort of connection with other people. So one of the quotes here says you're helping people solve problems and people are helping you to solve problems as well. Problems that you wouldn't necessarily be able to bring to the arena at work, maybe because of hierarchy. And then my second quote is very interesting one because it comes from a man and out of my participants only one sixth of the participants were male. Because that there's a ratio of around 10 to 1 women to men within JFE. And I believe that there is a similar ratio of women to men within FE itself. But his quote was that I think there's an allergy about females working around a queen bee where there's no kind of hierarchy and they're all whizzing around the queen. They're going different directions and report back. So in there he's referring to the ideas room as the queen bee as the core practice where there's no kind of hierarchy. However, people are whizzing around there creating their own practices as a result of the ideas room and then reporting back and feeding it back to JFE. And it has been fantastic to watch people have brilliant ideas and then go out and enact these ideas on the back of an idea that they might have brought to the ideas room. But the thing that sets this particular quote apart is that it was the man that said it and the fact that he talks about females working together. So he's sort of setting himself apart from JFE itself. And I know that some work has been done within JFE about getting men to the table. And this work has been quite difficult because we have a lot, we have most men that get involved within the ideas room, but they won't take that step further. They won't write for the magazine. They won't listen to the broadcast. They won't offer to create on Twitter. They won't go into different spheres that create a different level of involvement. So subject specific vocational communities of practice. So about 60% of my participants were very interested in the idea of creating a space that is subject specific with an ideas room format. Now, the ideas room format is very eclectic in that it brings people from all different subject specialisms. It brings people from all different walks of life within the FE spectrum. And it brings them together. And that in itself is very interesting in that you have such a mix and such a melting pot of different ideas that come up. So you might have support workers that join us and you might have quality leads that join us. You might have directors. So it is very, very diverse. However, people wanted something a little bit more specific. Now, one of my participants quoted Bell Hooks when she spoke about this and says that she's here to love. Now, the idea of love is a practice of care, which is something which is embodied within the thinking environment itself. So it's the idea of wanting that thinking environment framework around a more subject specific community of practice. Now, something quite interesting has come from this in that quite recently, a group of women have got together off the back of an ideas room and have set up subject specific vocational communities of practice where you go along and then you're sort of filtered into your subject specialism to talk to other subject specialists about wicked problems within that area. And that has come from an ideas room. So it's fantastic to see what progress is being made from just thinking together under the thinking environment framework. So next up, we've got third space. The idea that talking in your familial home, talking in your work life home, talking at work is very difficult to navigate and people wanting that extra space to really dig deep and think about things that are important to them. And the concept of third place itself was a physical place. This is the Oldenburg definition. Now, right says that when you move that online, it becomes a space rather than a place. And the ideas room is a third space for many people. So one of the participants spoke about being the only academic in her family. So wanting, so this participant was a PhD student as well, and she was wanting somewhere where she was able to talk about philosophy to be able to talk about teaching to chat about the students and how she was going to improve her own teaching, but also improve her own research as well. And then she said that she feels like she's coming to her family, which is a lovely analogy. But the idea that the ideas room creates this third space of people, it creates that it negates the complex relationships of families, it negates the complex hierarchical relationships at work. And it becomes a space where you can truly talk about ideas that your ideas may be around CPD, they may be around behavior, they may be around UPHD, they may be around study skills. It's so diverse. And that's what people want to think about. So finally, skepticism and rule. The application of the thinking environment does mean that the ideas room does have rules and these rules are set up at the beginning of each ideas room, just to put everybody on an even leveler. And some people found that they liked that because it felt like people being treated as equals whether they come for the first time, whether they come for the hundredth time, they were still being treated as an equal. Now, the trouble is that people found was they felt a little bit skeptic of these rules to begin with. Some people said that it was too strict. Some people have said that they felt like it was a sales pitch, a gimmick, because the thinking environment does and can feel fluffy at times. And there's not too much research into the application of the thinking environment. And so people are skeptical about it. And this skepticism has been met with unconditional ease, unconditional equality, all the components and the appreciation of one another, all the components that are still held in place. And I think it's quite powerful that people still keep returning, even though they have sort of expressed this skepticism and expressed this rule. Obviously, some people will come and feel that skepticism and then sort of turn off from it. Other people will come one time, feel the skepticism and say that's not for me. So it's interesting at the least. So finally, my key findings were that the thinking environment really helps to produce critical thinking within people. It helps to boost listening skills. And the ideas room itself is a place where people can come together and think about ideas that they might not necessarily be able to talk about at work or at home. Because it is a group of FE practitioners, they do generally think about things that are FE related. However, sometimes people do bring personal things to the ideas room. The limitations were that I would have liked my study to have been a little bit larger. And also that I use convenience sampling, which means that people may well have had a hidden agenda for wanting to respond to the open call that I put out. But my recommendations overall is that the subject specific vocational communities of practice using the ideas room format do go ahead and are well attended. And that if you are curious still about the ideas room that you have along one night. So thank you very much. Any questions? Hi Amber, that was really interesting. We've got one question I believe in the chat so far from Catherine. As she said, the thinking environment has been used to great effect in FE. Has it also been used in HE or my interest at the moment, the community education sector? I do know some community learning specialists that do use the thinking environment within every session that they do. And it has been used to really good effect in these sessions. However, I can't speak for anything wider than her practice itself. She's followed up with another question and said, have any student staff partnership projects emerged from the ideas room? It seems that the flattening of roles might facilitate this. Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot of staff and student partnerships that have come from the ideas rooms, particularly in health and beauty in a college in Chesterfield. They have fantastic relationships with their students because they bring the ideas that they might want to sort of develop to the ideas room, listen to everybody else's point of view and then they go and enact it. So I know, for example, that they hold sort of like enterprise markets on the back of the ideas room with the staff and the students working together and all sorts of other things like that. Catherine said she might get some references or contact names from you. So I think you've been very helpful for her. You've got another question saying, do you have a sense of how the thinking environment relates to something like open spaces technology or methodology? Open spaces and technology, I believe it's because we run this through a virtual community of practice, it is very difficult because it was designed primarily to be in person. So for example, one of the difficulties that we have is sort of negating the place component because the idea is that you're all in the same place together. And obviously with open spaces technology, you're not, you're very sort of diverse and far apart. So it's making sure that people are able to hold the components together and sort of have that mutual respect for the components. That's really interesting. This is a difficult situation, is it, with everyone being so distant and it makes everything challenging at the moment? Absolutely. If anyone's got any further questions, feel free to post them in the chat. We've just got a couple of minutes left of the session if anybody wants to ask anything further. But it's been really interesting, great to hear from you Amber. Thank you, I really enjoyed it. Just wait and see if anyone wants to ask anything else and we'll wrap up. I think that's it. So I think we will leave that there. Thank you all for joining us. It's been a really interesting session. Make sure to carry on the conversation over on Discord and on social media as well. Thanks for joining us.