World Café

A structure for one big conversation in small groups. The class sits at two to four tables, and every table gets its own theme on one central question, written large on a sheet in the middle of the table. In a round each table discusses its theme and everyone writes on the sheet. After the round everybody moves on to another table (only the host stays, if you work with hosts) and the new group builds on what is already there. After the last round the class comes together for the harvest: which ideas came back at more than one table?

With the default settings the whole structure takes ± 45 minutes: 3 rounds, briefing and look-back included.

With the default settings about three quarters of an hour: four minutes to put the themes on the tables, three rounds of eight minutes and ten minutes of harvest. That is thirty-eight minutes of steps, and the preparation adds three minutes for setting up the tables and two minutes for closing. Two rounds make it about thirty-five minutes, five rounds an hour. You set each step yourself, in steps of thirty seconds. The player only moves to the next round when you click.

Two to four tables, with three to six people per table; the default is four tables of four. Four or five per table works best: big enough for different ideas, small enough for everyone to write along. More than four tables makes two cafés: run them side by side with the same question and harvest together. The number of rounds is the number of tables each student visits; three is the classic choice. For every group to reach every table, choose as many rounds as tables. The first screen says how many tables each group gets to, and evens it out in one click.

The question is open, has no right answer and is big enough that four tables can each discuss a different side of it: "what makes our school a good place to learn?" yes, "how many classrooms does our school have?" no. The themes are those sides: who, where, when, why, or four domains, four characters, four interests. Test them by asking whether a group can talk about a theme for eight minutes without the previous table having said it already. No inspiration? Choose "AI writes them" in the preparation: you get a few possible central questions for your topic and tap one. The themes per table are yours to set afterwards: type them in the preparation, or with the group on the first screen. If you prefer your own assistant, such as Microsoft Copilot, copy the request there.

The whole class comes together; the table conversations are over. The questions on the screen are: which idea came back at more than one table, and what surprised you at a table that was not yours to begin with? You write the threads up where everyone can see them. It is expressly not a round of reports: four tables reading out in turn takes long and does not show what the tables found together. If you work with hosts, they make good first speakers: they have heard every group at their table.

No. World Café is an independent method by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, from the 1990s and older than the Liberating Structures collection. It often gets named in the same breath because it does the same job: letting everyone speak in a fixed, simple structure. That is why it sits on our Liberating Structures page, with that note attached.

Conversation Café is one table of four to eight people who stay seated: an object goes round, whoever holds it speaks, and after four rounds there is understanding, not a decision. Use it for a topic that is complex or loaded. World Café is the opposite: many tables, everyone moves, and the gain lies in what the tables find together. Choose Conversation Café to go deeper together, World Café to gather broadly.

All three have people moving between tables. In 1 goes, 3 stay teams trade results: each round one team member visits, three stay as hosts. In the Gallery Walk the teams go past each other's work to give feedback on it. In World Café there is no work and no result yet, only a question: the tables build on each other's thinking, and the harvest looks for what came back.

Beforehand: think of the themes yourself or with the class, and have a sheet and markers ready for each table. Themes you choose together go straight onto the first screen, where they stay for the whole café. During the rounds: walk around, check whether anything gets written, and tell a table that starts over that the first minute is for reading. At the end of a round: really get everyone moving, except the hosts, and only click on once the tables have written something down. In the harvest: ask what came back, not what was discussed, and write the threads up where everyone can see them; then the class leaves with something in hand.

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs developed the method in the mid-1990s and described it in The World Café (2005). The idea: the knowledge and the good ideas are already in the group, and by moving between small conversations they get connected. The host and the harvest come from their description; the LudensFlow version turns the host into a choice (a host stays, or the sheet remembers) and has the player wait for you instead of sending tables on mid-sentence. Why the sheet has to be the table's memory, we checked against Uncommon Sense Teaching by Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky and Terrence Sejnowski.