Follow these steps to plan facilitation you can test and improve
The design process is a series of intentional steps you can take to
- Research and define a problem.
- Identify users’ needs for solving that problem.
- Hypothesize, or suggest, solutions.
- Test solutions that are likely to succeed.
- Analyze your data from testing.
- Iterate - or revise - your project in response to the data.
- Continue testing until you have a working solution.
Sometimes, iterating your design means starting over, but you don’t usually have to start from scratch. What you learn from each failure informs and improves your next change or design. The idea is to reach a solution that works for your users - it need not be perfect and it can always be refined after more testing, especially with different audiences.
The design process connects to facilitation in big ways and small ones.
First, when you plan for an event, it’s crucial that you follow the design process in
- Knowing the content you want to teach.
- Identifying your audience’s needs for the how, what, and why of your content delivery.
- Brainstorming activities that you think will meet your learners’ needs and help them master your content.
- Drafting prototypes of the activities you think will be most successful.
- Testing with colleagues and trusted, critical friends.
Ideally, you either have a deep knowledge of the content you’re going to cover or the time to research it. You don’t have to know everything and you can be honest when you don’t know something (that builds trust), but depending on only superficial knowledge of a topic before you facilitate others’ work on it can unnecessarily - or even incorrectly - limit your learners’ potential and set up situations in which it’s apparent your audience can’t trust you to help them find the information they need. Be prepared as best you can for each event you facilitate and think of declining invitations or suggesting alternative facilitators in areas outside your expertise. Use those invitations as opportunities to define the scope and scale of your work and as prompts learn more about topics you’d like to teach.
You may not be able to test with your audience ahead of time, but you can send out a pre-event survey inviting your participants to share a little bit about
- Their background.
- Their level of comfort or mastery of the content you’re going to cover.
- Their questions about your content and about the event itself.
- Their answers, even if a bit skewed, will help you get a general sense of the activities and materials you have to prepare for each audience.
Next, brainstorm several different ways to teach each thing you’ll cover in your class, session, or workshop. Using the data you’ve collected from your pre-event survey, think of multiple entry points or pathways that would appeal to and engage your learners. Ask yourself, “How might I design an activity that teaches X to people who need Y?”
Depending on the amount of time you have for preparation and the amount of time you have during your event, pick the activities that you think are most likely to succeed with your audience. Use your learners’ needs as criteria, rather than your own assumptions about what’s good enough or what’s worked before at past events. You may very well develop a “playlist” of “greatest hits” activities over time, but if you do, it should be because those activities have proven to address a broad range of learners’ needs, not because you’ve used them a lot or really like them.
Once you have your prototyped activities in-hand, share them to your collaborators, critical friends, or even people who plan to attend your event. Ask
- Does this seem fun, engaging, or relevant to you?
- Does this connect to my learners’ needs?
- Does this connect to what I want to teach through the activity?
- What seems clear?
- What seems confusing?
Even a small set of targeted questions like those should let you iterate some before using activities with a live audience, so to speak.
Your observations during an event and the data you collect from feedback surveys afterwards can likewise inform changes you make to your activities, agendas, curricula, and syllabi between events. In fact, your preparation for the next event is really the enactment of your data-driven reflection on the last one.
You may have to do more work than you have in the past to reinvent the parts of your work that need reinvention for your learners, but that work is made easier when you look at the data, analyze it candidly, and make a good faith effort to improve what you do so your participants can learn as much as possible during the time you spend together in community.
This is the big design loop of facilitation. There are countless small ones that happen during an event, as well.
For example, when an activity tanks, you have to make a decision about following through, changing it, or ditching it entirely before moving on to the next one. You have to find ways to relate to and communicate with your learners so you can “read” the room and all the real-time feedback available to you in it. Or maybe technology fails. Or maybe an activity runs over time or under by a lot.
Part of improving your facilitation is planning for moments like these when tiny feedback loops kick in and let you know if something is working or not working for your learners during an
activity.
It’s not just the activities that you’re designing; it’s also the flow of the day you spend with your learners.
As you think of facilitating in the moment, start asking yourself and planning in response to questions like these:
- What do I say - and how can I be honest - when something doesn’t work?
- How do I rehearse for failure in ways that hold myself accountable without assigning blame to participants?
- If activity X doesn’t work, am I ready with an alternative or do we go straight to activity Y?
- If technology fails, am I ready to facilitate an offline approximation of each activity?
- What questions can I ask to improve an activity that sucks on the spot without assigning blame?
Each confusion and success during your event is a feedback loop you can use to design a better experience for your learners.
It is easier to store those pieces of feedback away during a workshop and to use them for planning the next one, but one challenge you face in becoming the best facilitator you can be is speeding up your response time to user feedback in the moment so that part of your design becomes equipping yourself with the emotional and materials resources needed to quickly shift gears mid-activity.
We’ll come back to this idea of facilitation in the moment and teaching small throughout the facilitation curriculum.
Use this self-assessment tool to think through how you already use the design process to plan facilitation and how you might use it even more intentionally in the future. As you continue through this curriculum and begin planning your next event, use this reflection as a prompt to plan as intentionally as possible to meet your learners’ needs.