Set expectations around posting and commenting through interactive celebration.

What?

As a community, take time to regularly celebrate great work in Unrulr.

Why?

  • Build a shared understanding of expectations and quality

  • Build community through celebration

  • Highlight new and different ways to tell stories

How?

There are many ways to celebrate work done in Unrulr.  One of our favorites is A Flower Shower.

Lesson Plan: A Flower Shower

Overview: 

Identify the criteria which makes posts great and invite learners to celebrate each others’ posts through affirmations (flowers!).

Objectives: 

  • Motivate posting

  • Build a shared definition of quality

  • Fun

Set the Criteria for a Great Post

This can change over time, as the group changes the focus of their work and continues to learn.  Some broad ideas for defining great include:

  • The media tells a strong story

  • The post shows vulnerability and/or thoughtful reflection

  • The post shows an attempt to learn from what happened

  • The post connects itself to the COGS accurately/uniquely

  • The post is joyful

  • The post shares a voice that might not be normally heard

When you share the criteria-of-the-week with the group, if it’s the first time you’ve used this criteria, or if you haven’t used it in a while, you might also need to share the why behind the criteria.  

Find an example from the most recent week

Go through posts in the group and find an amazing example.  Pull up the post in front of the group and highlight how it meets the criteria you set!  Some options for reviewing the post include:

  • Quickly walking learners through the post yourself

  • Asking learners to point out how they think the post succeeds

Flowers, Showered

To celebrate in-app, ask all the learners in the group to add a flower to that post (how do I add a flower?). These flowers act as mini-affirmations to the author of the work, celebrating them for the story they created.  And the flowers accumulate over time on the learner profile as a visible garden of growth.

Advanced: Flip It!

As always, we love when work is learner driven.  Here are two ways to give learners more agency.

Intermediate level

  • Give learners 5 options for the best post-of-the-week

  • Ask them to vote on which is their favorite that week

Advanced level

  • To start the lesson off, ask learners to define great for the week!

  • Have them explore and nominate the posts for the week (timebox at 3-5 minutes)

Advanced: Dig Deeper

Instead of asking learners to leave a flower on the post, ask them to write an affirmation in the comments.  This will take more time, but can help learners exercise their feedback skills and practice positive interactions.  Here are some example affirmation stems:

  • I like this post because…

  • I think this post is great because…

  • You should be proud because…

  • You helped me… By… 

  • Thank you for… Because… 

Monitor the affirmations as they come through, and find some to share back to the class (a celebration within a celebration!)