Leadership: Discussion Facilitation (or Facilitation 102)

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.

The Moves of a Discussion Facilitator
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.

Facilitator--One Who Makes Things Easier. Difficultator--One Who...?

I've been wrestling with the skill of facilitation lately--thinking about how we teach it in the dorms/barracks for student leaders, in the classroom for students, and in meetings for adults.

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

And these "meeting norms":
• 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? 

Shrinking Class Sizes...even if the schools can't/won't

Had some fantastic conversation with colleagues today about accommodations for ELLs, but the question kept coming up about how to provide accommodations for these students while still teaching the other students in the class. I suggested using the ESL Instructional Aides and Resource Teachers in the classroom in order to be more creative in our approach to teaching. Here are a couple of suggestions that came out of our conversation:

1. Teachers seem to often schedule their entire class for a day on Study Island (or another computer-based project where the students are largely working independently). The teacher's role is often to monitor the students on the computers or record the student results as they report in. If this is the case, then the suggestion is to schedule two days instead of one. Divide the class in half. Have half the students work on the computers or on the computer project. Work with the other half of the class in small group. On the second day, flip the groups. If someone needs to monitor/support the students on the computer, that's a great leadership opportunity for one of the students. If there is an instructional Aide in the class, that might be an opportunity for them, as well.

2. To get an even smaller class size, consider formalizing a group rotation format that will allow you to meet with groups of 10 (in the event that you have a class size of 30) so that you can target the needs of individual students. This will definitely require another adult for support, so it's most appropriate in classes where you have a collaborating teacher or a collaborating aide in the room. But here's how it would work:

The class would be divided into three groups. Group make-up, of course, is up to the teacher. It can be by ability level, language challenges, or heterogenous depending on the goal of the lesson. 

The class period would be split in half with groups rotating at the halfway point in the class. 

The whole class would be set up on a rotation that would look like this:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Monday
Group Red	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent
Group Blue	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B
Group Yellow	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A

So for the Red group, the first half of class on Monday would be spent in 20-25 minutes of direct instruction with Teacher A. At the halfway point in the class, they would move to Teacher B for some guided independent practice of the concept just taught. For the Blue group, they would start out Monday working on, perhaps, a computer program like Study Island or Fastt Math. Then, they would go to direct instruction with Teacher A. For the Yellow group, they would start out with Teacher B for the first half of the class and then go to the independent assignment for the second half of the class.

Some thoughts/ideas:
*.This rotation is set up so that every seventh instructional day is an assessment day, and then the teacher can reassign groups based on student need. 
*. The role of Teacher B may be intervention. It may be language instruction. It may be upping the ante for the students who seem to be breezing through the concept. That's part of the cool part of this rotation. 
*. Getting the students used to the rotation/having the grouping and the rotations posted on the classroom wall is key to the success of this idea. Otherwise, too much instructional time will be wasted in procedures.