Reflections on our Thinking Environment Day of Practice and Discovery

The Delegates

Last week we had our long-heralded Day of Practice and Discovery at Durham University. We brought together 40 people who are interested in the use of Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment in the context of HE or FE. It was a remarkable day for several reasons.

The first was that we heard from a range of people in different HE and FE settings who have been experimenting with the use of the Thinking Environment; from those using it as a modus operandi in PhD supervision (which is pretty radical, when you think about it!) to those who have found that it enables and supports cultural change at the organisational level. For details of all the sessions, see here.

The second was that every session included extensive opportunities for all present to think together about whatever the presenters had shared. We used a range of Thinking Environment approaches to do this, including rounds, thinking pairs, dialogue, and a Thinking Council.

The Team

The third was that the whole day had been put together using Thinking Environment principles from the start. The organising team met and thought together about what needed to be done and organised themselves to do it. 

The fourth was that all delegates were offered opportunities, both one-to-one and group, to experience the Thinking Environment in practice, prior to the conference, to ensure they had a rich understanding of the ideas underpinning the day.

And the fifth was that the whole day was done on a shoe-string budget, so that we could offer it for £50 a head - just enough to cover the hire of the venue and the food. We (almost) broke even.

The result was a day that was buzzing from start to finish, with high levels of engagement, and loads of fresh thinking arising in every session. We are collating some of the outputs now and they will appear in due course on the TE in HE website.  And we all had a lot of fun, too.