Building a Community of Practice: A Deck of Lenses

This nine-card deck offers a playful way to engage members of a community of practice in collaborative dialogue, reflection and strategic planning. This original deck of cards draws inspiration from The Art of Game Design. We designed our cards to help people define what makes a community of practice strong and what could make it even stronger.

Today, the learning needs of educators, both formal and informal, are shifting at alarming rates. Our Deck of Lenses is one of the many ways Convergence helps support communities of practice by offering powerful strategies for generating critical new knowledge that can help people transform their practice and accommodate ongoing changes in technologies and learner needs. 

There are a myriad of ways to use our CoP Decks of Lenses cards, both in person and virtually.  Each of the nine cards offers a simple, focused prompt to discuss, allowing folks to dive deep into important considerations without being overwhelmed by the task of improving every aspect of the work. Download the cards and test them out. And let us know how we can help build your CoP!

Professional Development for Library Workers

Profile

ALA is committed to sustaining community engagement work in the field. Over the recent years, the Libraries Transforming Community initiative has worked to build the capacity for library workers to improve the well-being of their communities by equipping them with the skills necessary to listen to and lead conversations on important local and national issues. A more robust array of professional development materials fostering this work in libraries is a priority of ALA.

Challenge

ALA’s Public Programs division approached us with the need for a more dynamic way to provide professional development to libraries in small and rural communities. Utilizing the content of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, ALA was interested in offering engaging learning experiences in order to build the facilitation skills of library workers.

Approach

We designed a series of multimodal interactive e-courses that armed these adult learners with a powerful new set of community engagement tools. We took a “project-based learning for adults” approach, grounding the courses in the real, nuanced experiences of library workers in small and rural communities. The courses centered the voices of library workers speaking about their experiences navigating the complex world of community voices, varied needs, politics, and conflict transformation. We built resources, interactives, and custom conversation planning tools in order to guide learners to create a concrete, usable plan for facilitating community conversations.

Convergence Design Lab is highly professional and flexible. Margaret, Mindy and team were fantastic about working with us and our project partners to develop an eCourse that is engaging and well-designed. The eCourse has gotten a great response from participants. We can’t recommend them highly enough.

—Samantha Oakley, Public Programs Manager, American Library Association