I've been geeking out on etymology, too. So look up "facilitate" in the Online Etymology Dictionary, and you'll see that it has the stem of "facil" (easy) and "facere" (do). So to make something easy. Facilitating a conversation? The facilitator's role is to make that conversation easy. My best friend doesn't like the term. If teachers are facilitators, then our role isn't to make things easy. It's to make things more difficult. She coined the term "Difficultator." I like it. I can't quite sell it yet, but I'm filing it away with my daughter's term, "detorial" (the detour you take when a student question pops up during a lesson, and you go off script to "tutor" them in that moment).
In the dorms and barracks for student leaders...
Several years ago (I can't remember how many because it was so awful that I long blocked the experience out of my mind), I was invited to be an adult guest in a student-facilitated meeting. I was told it was "an honor" to be invited, so I accepted the invitation. When I arrived at the meeting, I wasn't offered a seat; I was waved over to the corner. The girls in the room went around and introduced themselves to each other. They skipped me. When it got to the meat of the meeting, I was never invited into the conversation. And frankly, they weren't facilitating well. And then when they handed out cookies, they skipped me. That was the last straw. It took me years to accept another invitation to a student-facilitated meeting.
Fast forward to my second go-round at Culver. Our mission: "Culver educates its students for leadership and responsible citizenship..." I have thought about that bad meeting many times in my encounters with student leaders. When I returned back to Culver, I started thinking, also, about the phrase, "When we knew better, we did better." I think we can do better with not just giving our students opportunities to lead, but also giving them feedback on that leadership so that they can grow their skills.
This August, I gave a facilitation workshop for the CGA Seniors. I had all 90 or so (I feel like there were more?) CGA Seniors in the room, and I told them the story of that really bad meeting. And I told them that they would be facilitating meetings during their senior year. And I told them that I was there to help them to not facilitate really bad meetings.
I kicked off with some core beliefs about facilitation:
1. It’s not about me. (Even if it feels like it is.)
2. Facilitation is a complex skill, and it is difficult to get it right no matter how often you do it.
3. There isn’t one right way to facilitate, and there are a lot of wrong ways.
4. Good and bad meetings happen; talking about them productively is where facilitator growth happens.
And then I shared my four keys to backwards design of a facilitation experience:
1. What do we want the outcome to be? (head and heart)
2. What do we need to do to get it there? (the plan)
3. How will we know if the plan is working? And how will we make adjustments if it isn’t working? (accountability)
4. What will we do when we are finished so we improve next time? (meta feedback)
And we focused on the fourth one for this meeting; our focus became about figuring out what a "good" meeting might include so that we can then get feedback to improve for next time. The thing is, students know what they like in a meeting. We all actually know what we like in a meeting. So I asked them to do a "norm-setting" exercise, but I framed it around meetings. If you are in a meeting, what do you want/need from a facilitator?
Groups came up with a list of traits on their own (I asked them to first write individually and then to pare that list down to get it to a manageable number). And those were to become their facilitation targets for the year.
I shared with them this list of facilitation targets in case they didn't already have a full list:
- Develop meaningful agendas
- Communicate “why” of the meeting
- Give effective directions
- Engage every participant
- Manage group energy
- Control dominant participants
- Show courage
- Actively listen
- Model expected behaviors
- Have a sense of humor
- Refocus when the group gets off track
But the groups already had a number of these on their lists.
And then I sent them off with these three charges for the class of 2019:
1. Grow your facilitation skills this year.
2. Have more “good meetings” than “bad ones.”
3. Good or bad: Seek out/give feedback on facilitation.
Looking forward to checking in to see how they are doing.
As a leadership opportunity in the classroom...
But I've also been thinking about facilitation in the classroom. So often, I put students into groups and ask them to work together; sometimes I give them roles in those groups. But seldom do I take the opportunity to develop them as facilitators in those moments. (Telling a student they are the "leader" isn't the same as teaching them how to facilitate.)
This one is still very much in development for me, but I'm working on it with the students in my Humanities 10 class right now.
Our course has this goal: Students will speak to communicate and collaborate confidently, deliberately, and articulately in a variety of environments.
So the "collaborate confidently" part intrigues me as does the "variety of environments." The bite I'm going to take out of this course goal has to do with facilitation as collaboration, so I'm going to work on this with my students.
Instead of assigning group roles when I last put my students into groups, I assigned one role: facilitator. Everyone else? Participants. I had an assignment that was broken into four parts. And I had groups of four. So each student was charged with facilitating their part of the conversation; I assigned the order for the facilitators so that I could keep track of who was supposed to be facilitating at any given time.
The three groups of four students were at tables in three of the corners of the room (my classes are small, so I technically had three facilitators working at a time), and I put my chair in the center of those groups. And then I listened and took notes on the facilitation.
I noted moments like "connects two participants' ideas together" or "answers the question herself instead of asking the question of group" or "redirects conversation to get it back on topic" or "missed opportunity to invite comment from participant A." And when students finished covering the content in their small groups, I shared my facilitation observations with the individual groups. And then we had a whole-class conversation to fill in any gaps on the content of the conversations.
It's a start. I think the next step is to take those comments and turn them into a frame for their next facilitated conversations. So those notes from last time will become a front-end conversation about the skill of facilitation and what they are trying to practice. At some point, I imagine this might end up in a more formal (formative/summative?) feedback mechanism, but I'm not sure what that is right now.
It feels like this might be the "right bite" for the sophomore speaking goal--can we help turn our student "participants" into effective student leader "facilitators?"
As facilitation relates to norms (meetings for adults)...
I wrote earlier about fine-tuning some thinking on norm setting. After actually going through a norm setting exercise with the teaching team I'm on last year, I reflected on some of the "norms" that were suggested by the team, and they just didn't seem to fit in the category of "group norms." They felt more like calls to a facilitator. And we have a number of different people facilitating conversations at our level, so we decided to separate the two sets of norms out.
We have these "facilitator norms" for the Humanities 10 team:
• Respect beginning/ending time
• Define targets: discussion, dialogue, decision-making?
• Create space for contributions from the room—avoid the ping pong
• Thoughtfully plan agendas + learning/working groups
• Be open to feedback on facilitation
• Be prepared
• Be present
o minimize distractions, listen actively
o be mindful of air time—taking too much or too little
o allow ideas to simmer
• Own group decisions
• Assume good intentions
And a final note
There is plenty of literature out there on holding better meetings. And there are plenty of people who complain a lot about having meetings. I'm really interested in both having better meetings and having people who don't complain about having meetings. That's the reason for the wrestle--how can we not just fine-tune our own facilitation skills but also support the development of other facilitators?
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