Thanks for writing this up! We tried this out in our group today and it went pretty well :-)
Detailed feedback:
Because our venue didn’t have internet I ended up designing and printing out question sheets for us to use (google docs link). Being able to compare so many responses easily, we were able to partner up first and find disagreements second, which I think was overall a better experience for complete beginners. The takes that you were most polarized on with any random person weren’t actually that likely to be the ones that you feel the most strongly about, and there were generally a few options to choose from. So we got a lot of practice in with cruxing without getting particularly heated. I’d like to find a way to add that spice back for a level 2 double crux workshop, though!
We repurposed using the showing fingers for agreement/disagreement for coming up with custom questions; we had quite a few suggestions but only wrote down the ones that got a decent spread in opinion. This took a while to do, but was worth it, because I was actually really bad at choosing takes that would be controversial in the group, and people were like “wtf Jenn how can we practice cruxing if we all agree that everything here is a bunch of 3s.” (slightly exaggerated for effect)
I didn’t realize this until I was running the event, but this write-up was really vague on what was supposed to happen after step 3! I ended up referencing this section of the double crux post a lot, and we ended up with this structure:
partner up and identify a polarized opinion from the question sheet that you and your partner are both interested in exploring.
spend 5 minutes operationalizing the disagreement.
spend 5 minutes doing mostly independent work coming up with cruxes.
spend 15 minutes discussing with your partner and finding double cruxes. (in our experience, it was actually quite rare for the cruxes to have overlapped!) you’ll very likely have to do more operationalizing/refining of the disagreement here. (I’m not sure if that’s normal or if we’re doing it slightly wrong.)
come back together in a large group, discuss your experience trying to find a double crux and one learning from your attempt to convey to the rest of the group so everyone learns from others’ experiences/mistakes. I did this in lieu of the checking in, because the discussions all seemed pretty tame.
repeat from step 1, with a different partner and different opinion.
We did two rounds in total. People unfortunately did not report that the second round was generally easier than the first, but seemed to overall find the workshop a valuable experience! One person commented that it led to much more interesting conversation than most readings-based meetups, and I’m inclined to agree.
I’ve added a link to your google doc in Variations! We’ve got a bunch of different ways to pair people now, that’s cool :) I think I’m going to try your handout next time I run this, I’ll let you know how it goes!
I also added a bit more to step three, with a little more detail on what the pairs are doing. I’ll probably come back and try to break it down a bit more later; I’d sort of given the steps after “So how do we actually do this?” but this does have less detail than I’d like and doesn’t stand alone as well as it could as an explanation.
Thanks for writing this up! We tried this out in our group today and it went pretty well :-)
Detailed feedback:
Because our venue didn’t have internet I ended up designing and printing out question sheets for us to use (google docs link). Being able to compare so many responses easily, we were able to partner up first and find disagreements second, which I think was overall a better experience for complete beginners. The takes that you were most polarized on with any random person weren’t actually that likely to be the ones that you feel the most strongly about, and there were generally a few options to choose from. So we got a lot of practice in with cruxing without getting particularly heated. I’d like to find a way to add that spice back for a level 2 double crux workshop, though!
We repurposed using the showing fingers for agreement/disagreement for coming up with custom questions; we had quite a few suggestions but only wrote down the ones that got a decent spread in opinion. This took a while to do, but was worth it, because I was actually really bad at choosing takes that would be controversial in the group, and people were like “wtf Jenn how can we practice cruxing if we all agree that everything here is a bunch of 3s.” (slightly exaggerated for effect)
I didn’t realize this until I was running the event, but this write-up was really vague on what was supposed to happen after step 3! I ended up referencing this section of the double crux post a lot, and we ended up with this structure:
partner up and identify a polarized opinion from the question sheet that you and your partner are both interested in exploring.
spend 5 minutes operationalizing the disagreement.
spend 5 minutes doing mostly independent work coming up with cruxes.
spend 15 minutes discussing with your partner and finding double cruxes. (in our experience, it was actually quite rare for the cruxes to have overlapped!) you’ll very likely have to do more operationalizing/refining of the disagreement here. (I’m not sure if that’s normal or if we’re doing it slightly wrong.)
come back together in a large group, discuss your experience trying to find a double crux and one learning from your attempt to convey to the rest of the group so everyone learns from others’ experiences/mistakes. I did this in lieu of the checking in, because the discussions all seemed pretty tame.
repeat from step 1, with a different partner and different opinion.
We did two rounds in total. People unfortunately did not report that the second round was generally easier than the first, but seemed to overall find the workshop a valuable experience! One person commented that it led to much more interesting conversation than most readings-based meetups, and I’m inclined to agree.
Thanks for the feedback!
I’ve added a link to your google doc in Variations! We’ve got a bunch of different ways to pair people now, that’s cool :) I think I’m going to try your handout next time I run this, I’ll let you know how it goes!
I also added a bit more to step three, with a little more detail on what the pairs are doing. I’ll probably come back and try to break it down a bit more later; I’d sort of given the steps after “So how do we actually do this?” but this does have less detail than I’d like and doesn’t stand alone as well as it could as an explanation.