18. Modified World Café Discussion Model for Conference and Course Settings

A group facilitation technique called World Café usually involves dividing a large number of people into smaller groups at tables, exploring a variety of topics around a key focus, and collecting ideas from the discussions to debrief later as a large group. We used a modified version of World Café during the new Cracker Barrel session format at the 2012 STLHE conference. Inviting conference participants to explore science through writing, we met our goal of interactivity and collected ideas from 33 people in spite of the challenges of time (a 15-minute session repeated three times for different groups) and space (11 participants around one table each time). The success of involving conference participants actively in this new conference format shows its value as a conference technique and also led us to consider its utility in the classroom or other settings.