Think about the community you are offering this program to and how they might grow through this learning experience. You might consider:

• What are the strengths of my community's current practices and understandings?
• Do the common understandings and practices that circulate in my context serve all community members or do they differentially advantage and disadvantage individuals?
• What specific shifts in understanding or practice might increase equity relative to this topic within my community?

• Change efforts are more likely to be successful if change agents are aware of their departmental, disciplinary, and institutional landscape relative to the changes that they are pursuing. This mapping allows them to better understand and plan for barriers to change, to identify groups who have or have not had access to skill-building opportunities on this topic, to avoid duplicating efforts, and to determine how new efforts might build upon or amplify existing resources.
• Planning in this way opens up exciting possibilities for thinking collaboratively and curricularly about professional development opportunities for your community members. This action can forestall a common tendency to offer a scattered set of disconnected one-off offerings that may even offer conflicting advice!

Given your mapping of other resources available relative to the topic you are exploring, how can the Players best support your community? Consider the list of (not mutually exclusive) ways a Players session might most effectively engage your community below:

• Invite people into a new community-wide conversation
• Bring groups together to collaboratively discuss topics typically addressed in siloes
• Reactivate core values and principles for practice
• Build on foundational work to push practice forward
• Reflect on context-specific individual or structural strengths and growth areas
• Provide an additional venue for distributing and making connections between community resources

Consider the content of the session and your learning goals. Try to ensure that the content will be relevant for the people attending, and that they have the power to contribute to change relative to the session goals.

• Academic Leaders– It can be very useful to have people in leadership positions attend the session you are hosting. Their presence can signal that the goals of the session are important, and that there is some expectation that status quo practices will change. That said, leadership can undermine session success if:
  • An implicit goal of the session is to foster candid contributions from people who hold roles with less institutional power about a challenging topic within the community.
  • The leader demonstrates they are unsupportive of session goals or subsequent action.
  • The leader engages in (or advocates) for biased/inequitable practices.
• Instructors– In sessions focused on teaching practice or institutional climate, it is often appropriate to invite instructors of all levels (graduate student instructors, lecturers, faculty, etc.) to Players sessions. Depending on the specific content and goals of a session, though, participants may find more or less applicability, given their role responsibilities. Make sure to indicate who the session is designed for in marketing materials (e.g. this session is for instructors who mentor graduate students), so there isn’t a mismatch between audience expectations and the session itself.
• Staff– CRLT Players sessions have not been designed for broad staff audiences, and as such are not appropriate for staff-only audiences. There are, though, good reasons you might consider including staff in the invitation to your event.
  • If a session focuses on institutional climate, it is often very important to invite staff. Though staff are often not engaged meaningfully in conversations on this topic, it is essential to do so as staff are both affected by an organization’s climate and contribute in key ways to shaping faculty and student’s experiences of climate.
  • If a staff member will be expected to play a role in a possible change in practice explored in a Players session, they should be encouraged to attend that session so that they can share their perspective on the ways they could and could not support these shifts. (Because faculty often have minimal understanding of staff portfolios and workloads, they frequently assume staff can do things that are not actually possible!)