Facilitation

Group Prompts

Now that you’re familiar with the learning circle model and you know how to create one, we can discuss your role as a facilitator. A good starting place is by getting a sense of what you mean by facilitation and hearing from others who have facilitated learning experiences in the past.

• What’s the difference between teaching and facilitation?
• Does anyone have experience facilitating small groups that they want to share?

Strategies

As a learning circle facilitator, your job is not to teach, but instead to guide, build community, help each learner achieve their goals. It certainly is helpful to be excited or passionate about the learning circle topic, however you are not expected to be a content expert. Good facilitation requires a lot of different tasks:

• Listening to learners
• Asking clarifying statements
• Providing good feedback
• Keeping discussions on task
• Probing assumptions and evidence
• Eliciting viewpoints and perspectives
• Mediating conflicts
• Summarizing and presenting findings

Group Activities

There are also many other ways to support dialogue between participants, taking the pressure off of you to be a teacher.

• Goal setting
• Ice breakers
• Have feedback sessions during the meeting
• Present final work to one another other or to the public
• Come together weekly to problem solve around common issues
• Go on a field trip
• Host a local speaker

That’s a lot, but don’t worry, nobody is expecting you to be perfect from day one, and it will become much easier with practice.

Further Reading

If you want some more feedback from our community, take a look at all our activities and share your own with us on our community forum. You can also read and watch more on the facilitate section of our website.

Activity: 10-Minute Facilitation

Why talk about facilitation, when we can just practice? This activity is designed to help get you comfortable facilitating, practicing what you know. We’ve pulled together a handful of 5-minute long Youtube videos about a variety of topics. These will serve as our mini-learning circles! Divide into small groups of 5-8, based on what participants are most interested in learning. The 5-minute long videos videos you can choose from are:

• How to shoot better video with your phone (CNBC)
• What really happened to the Library of Alexandria? (TED-Ed)
• 10 tips for better Google searches (Epic Tutorials)
• Understanding spam email and phishing (GCF LearnFree)
• Five tips for better public speaking (Toastmasters International)
• Or, search for anything else that you want to learn about

Once each group is together, they should nominate somebody to be the facilitator. Ideally this is someone who may feel uneasy in the facilitator role. They then watch the video together. When the video ends, the facilitators gets to lead discussion for five minutes. After five minutes of discussion…

• Everyone should have spoken at least once
• Everyone should be able to summarize what happened
• Nobody should storm out of the room in tears
• You should still be talking about (more or less) the topic of the video
• Everybody should have learned at least one new thing (either from the video or their colleagues)

Feel free to repeat with a new video and new facilitator as many times as you’d like. When you are finished, take 10 minutes to talk (either in small groups or as a large group again) and share feedback about how people experienced the role of the learner and the facilitator, and what facilitation strategies they noticed. Up next: Plus Delta

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