Facilitating discussions is difficult. Facilitating difficult conversations is even more difficult. But the skill of facilitation is important. And we often put our students in a position to lead workshops for other students, and those workshops usually include students leading some form of discussion. In order to teach and to give an opportunity for some students to practice this particular skill this week, I developed a workshop that I thought might be worth sharing here.
Discussion Facilitation 101
When I met with this same group of students in August, our workshop centered on holding meetings, in general. So we started off with some conversation about what their term one experience had been. I was most interested in the comments about how some groups had a lot of enthusiasm, but they didn't have agendas (so the enthusiasm wore off). And others on how they had agendas but limited engagement, and that frustrated them. I've witnessed both as I've wandered through some meetings during term 1--one meeting had great people in the room ready to dig into a topic, but no clear path laid out for them to do so; another meeting had a clear agenda and a facilitator bent on getting through that agenda, but no clear sense of the people in the room and what they might need (or how the items on the agenda connected to one another). Both meetings ended up feeling just painful.
So for the purposes of helping students become successful facilitators (or "ones who makes the way easy"), I put out these three ideas to the room:
1. In order to facilitate a good discussion, it's helpful for the facilitator to believe that the topic of conversation is worth having. If a facilitator isn't "into" the discussion, the participants will have a hard time getting into it, as well.
2. In order to facilitate a good discussion, the facilitator needs to invest in the people in the room. Facilitators need to be invested in making the way easy for those people in that moment. And that means tuning into their needs and contributions.
3. In order to facilitate a good discussion, the facilitator needs to make it easy for the people in the room to invest in the topic and invest in each other. It can't just be about the facilitator building a relationship with the people in the room--it has to be about helping the participants build a relationship with one another. Getting this balance right is a complicated balancing act.
In very simple terms, I told my workshop participants that they should: "Talk less. Listen more. Seek balance in the group. Wait (longer than you think you should). Anticipate the next move. Stay neutral."
Tall order.
It's helpful for facilitators to keep in mind that there are a number of different moves they can make during a discussion to make the way easy for participants. I found this list from a Stanford website, and modified it for the purposes of sharing out just a few moves for their toolkit. A facilitator can (and should):
- Seek ideas and opinions: “What other ideas are in the room?”
- Clarify: “What I think I hear you saying is…”
- Summarize: “The main points that have been raised are…”
- Test consensus: “Is there agreement that…?”
- Harmonize: “We seem to be stuck. How can we move the discussion along?”
- Gatekeep: “Thanks for that input. What do others think?”
- Steer: “We seem to have gotten away from our purpose. Can someone get us back on track?”
I gave participants in the workshop the list of cueing words on a handout and then asked them to write down the associated question for each of the words. I hoped that by having them note the questions, they would put them into their working memory for the practice to come in the workshop.
Incidentally (or not so incidentally, really), when I'm asking students to practice a new skill with what they consider to be elevated language (so formal academic discussion, for example), they are usually pretty reluctant to try out more formal language unless they get a "license" from me to use it. It's awkward to try out new language on your own. The license comes in the form of sentence starters like those I've outlined above. If a student has the sentence on paper in front of them, they are more willing to use it.
The Distractions
In a perfect world, everyone in the room would be so invested in the conversation AND able to manage their own inner squirrels that there would be 100% focus on the topic. In reality, that seldom happens. So in the workshop, we also talked all the distractions. I labeled them this way:
- Dominating: A participant who wants to talk the entire time and not yield the floor.
- Withdrawing: A participant who refuses to participate or separates from the group.
- Degrading: A participant who puts down or disregards another person's ideas.
- Holding Side conversations: Yeah, this happens a lot.
- Distractions (electronic or squirrels): A participant who pulls out a cell phone or otherwise finds distraction in the room itself.
I charged the group with thinking about how to deal with each of these while keeping the bigger goals of the group discussion in mind.
"The greatest gap in the world is the gap between knowing and doing." Practice.
It's easy to say all of the above, but it's hard to practice all of the above. So I wanted to create a practice opportunity for them in the moment, and some took a swing at facilitating in the workshop.
I asked each table group to designate a facilitator who wanted to practice facilitation skills. And then I posted a topic for discussion and asked them to run the discussion for five minutes. Topics were pretty low stakes (improvements for the dorm, cell phone policy). And the only target for the discussion was to "explore the topic."
To try to make the experience more authentic, I also designated a distractor at each table. So that the facilitator wouldn't know who the distractor was, I distributed a playing card to each person at the table besides the facilitator. And for each conversation, I called out a number. A person holding that number card had the option of doing one of the distracting behaviors during the discussion. My thinking was that designating a distractor would mean that each facilitator would have to deal with at least one facilitator. I asked that the distractor please respond appropriately to correction.
I'd love to say that this activity went perfectly, but there were two problems: 1) There just wasn't enough time. 2) The distractors got into their distracting, and people were distracted by the distractors.
Time: My guess is this would work better if we had 10 minutes for each "micro discussion." It would give the facilitator long enough to have to work to keep the discussion moving. We also then needed time to give feedback to the facilitators about their facilitation. We didn't have that time at all. And that's the point--we get better at facilitating when we have the chance to learn from our facilitation.
Distractions: I think time would have probably helped here, too, actually. Having enough time to deal with the distraction and then get the discussion back on track for the facilitator would have helped their experience. I also think I should have done at least one round (if not more) where there were no designated distractors to give participants time to get in the rhythm of discussion. Being a distraction wasn't a naturally spot for a number of kids to be in, so it was a lot of fun, but it might have taken away from the bigger point.
Two big successes. 1) We got to have some conversation about professionalism among their peers. We acknowledged that it is difficult to correct a distractor, especially when a distractor is a friend. But we also talked about how that happens throughout our lives--we have working relationship, and we have friendships, and sometimes we have to navigate both at the same time. 2) I could hear the language of facilitation in the form of the sentence starters coming out of facilitators, and I could hear the discussion moves being made. I'm hoping that the language might stick enough to make their next discussion facilitation better.
