Hacking the Syllabus

Serious Play Workshops

Student Workshop: Problem Solving, Voice, and Decision Making Through Play

This workshop shifts how students experience problem solving by focusing on how they think rather than on arriving at a single correct answer. Through hands-on model building and structured scenarios, students develop skills that carry well beyond the session:

Practice interpreting information and explaining their reasoning in real time
Build flexibility, experimentation, and confidence through play-based activities
Make thinking visible so students can reflect on and strengthen their own approaches
Engage more openly and take risks they might otherwise avoid
Build stronger connections to their own learning, especially during exam preparation or academic transitions

Teachers Can Play Too: Reflection and Alignment Through Serious Play

This workshop creates a structured space for educators and administrators to surface insights that are often left unspoken. Using guided model building and reflection, participants explore complex topics through metaphor, allowing difficult conversations to feel constructive rather than confrontational.

Explore challenges like student engagement, burnout, and institutional change through hands-on methods
Move from individual reflection to collective alignment
Connect personal experiences to shared challenges and coordinated action
Delivered as a single session or across multiple meetings
Build stronger alignment among staff and clearer direction for improving school environments

Strategic Vision and Direction Setting

When priorities compete and direction becomes diffuse, these sessions help leadership make tradeoffs visible and decisions explicit.

Build a shared understanding of what success requires
Identify what must stop, begin, or change
Move forward with clarity and alignment

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Dialogue

Sensitive conversations around equity and difference are approached through structured, facilitated engagement.

Reduce escalation while maintaining honesty
Examine how identity, perspective, and power shape collaboration
Support stability and long term organizational durability

Leadership and Cross-Level Alignment

These sessions bring executives, managers, and frontline staff into a single structured space.

Surface and align assumptions across levels
Develop a shared working model of how the organization actually functions
Identify where coordination breaks down and what needs to shift

Culture and Team Cohesion

Create conditions where unspoken dynamics can be expressed constructively.

Strengthen trust and clarify expectations
Reinforce accountability under pressure
Build cohesion that is embedded in day to day practice, not temporary

Method & Outputs

For over eight years, I have designed and facilitated serious play style workshops across boardroom settings, team environments, education spaces, and youth focused programs. Sessions often include LEGO and other simple hands-on tools. The purpose is to lower defenses so groups can surface what is usually hard to say, explore options faster, and move toward shared clarity.

Research grounded documentation

I combine facilitation with research based techniques for data gathering, coding, and synthesis. Organizations can receive tailored deliverables such as thematic summaries, decision logs, and management ready reports. Reporting can draw on qualitative and quantitative approaches depending on the goal and the engagement format.

Important note

This work draws inspiration from serious play style facilitation. It does not claim LEGO Serious Play certification.

Format

Sessions can be two hours, three hours, half day, full day, or a three day engagement that brings in different stakeholder groups. Group sizes can be four to twenty. The ideal size is eight to twelve.

How it works

We start with a short discovery conversation to clarify outcomes and participants. I then design the session structure and any light prework. We run the workshop and close with clear themes, decisions, and next steps.

Documentation options

Documentation can include a synthesis memo, leadership ready recommendations, or visual documentation when useful. Scope depends on your goals, session length, and how many stakeholder groups are involved.

About

Ikee Gibson

Facilitator · Toronto, Ontario

Ikee Gibson is a PhD candidate whose work examines how organizations interpret and respond to change, particularly in the context of shifting populations and evolving institutional demands.

His research draws on organizational theory, culture, and stratification to understand how people make sense of complexity and how those interpretations shape everyday practice.

Alongside this work, Ikee has a longstanding interest in problem solving, especially in team environments where progress depends on how people think together. His facilitation builds from that interest. Using structured, hands-on methods grounded in play, he creates space for groups to surface insight, rethink assumptions, and move toward shared clarity. In this context, play is not a break from the work. It is a way of doing the work differently, reducing monotony, inviting participation, and often unlocking forms of thinking that more conventional approaches miss.

You can reach Ikee directly at ikee@hackingthesyllabus.ca or 6473004904.