Sean McCusker’s Research Paper on Lego®, Seriously: Thinking through Building

Sean McCusker

The International Journal of Knowledge, Innovation and Entreprenurship published the paper of Serious Play Pro community member Sean McCusker about Lego®, Seriously: Thinking through building. Sean is Research Fellow in the School of Education of Durham University.

The paper presents a case study about how groups engaged in a workshop that guided them through work with their own identities. They started off by describing their current identities. Thereafter they built ideal models and analyzed through series of shared model building tasks on how to best move towards the ideal. The paper offers a generic comparison of group-work properties between general preschool teachers group, mathematics teachers group and a group from small engineering firm. It broadly described their engagement in the task.

The paper abstract is: “LEGO® Serious Play™ (LSP) is a methodology which has been developed primarily for use in business contexts, initially with Real-Time Identity for You, Real-Time Strategy for the Team and Real-Time Strategy for the Enterprise. However, many of the principles which underpin the methodology are supported within the educational research literature. The findings discussed here represent some of the efforts in reclaiming LSP for the educational domain. The current study introduces LSP as a method of getting at participants’ understanding of their own professional identities. It details the process of the development of workshops and reflects on the aspects of ‘What Works’ within and across a small number of educational contexts. Results from two distinct groups are discussed, pre-service Teachers and Employees in a Small / Medium Enterprise (SME).”

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