Facilitation tips for participation, ditching boring lectures, building authentic connection
Hello Friends!
Greetings from Barcelona☀️ where the vaccine rollout is as slow as a snail having a siesta🐌.
Many thanks for your feedback on the last edition of The Quest. A special shout out to Ali in the US, Claudia in London, Caroline and Viliana in Barcelona, Joan in Mansfield, Mike, Connie and Julia in Toronto, Andrew in New York, Allegra in Seattle, Adam in Oakland, and Kasia in Brussels 🙌.
If you are joining The Quest for the first time, welcome to our weekly exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning.
You can catch up on last week’s edition on 🧊Icebreakers, and all past editions here.
This week we are exploring how to spark participation 🔎
👉 10 facilitation strategies to boost participation.
👉 Forget boring lectures. Here’s a better plan.
👉 Alternatives to asking “How Are You?”
👉 Plus an update on the live icebreaker session and more…
Let’s dive right in.
😬If you have led any kind of class or meeting you may know the feeling:
You’ve just finished explaining a concept. You cast a juicy question out to the group.
You wait for someone to answer.
Anyone.
No one bites.
Several awkward moments pass and you start to panic.
What if no one speaks?
What if it’s a sign that people have lost interest?
What if the whole thing goes off the rails?
And then at last. Someone raises their hand. It’s the person who always raises their hand.
They have saved you once again. Until the next time.
No matter what kind of group you may work with, participation doesn’t just happen. You have to create the conditions for participation to flourish.
So how do you encourage all group members to participate?
That’s our Quest for this week.
🔥10 facilitation strategies that boost participation
We are now into week 2 of the On Deck Course Creator’s Fellowship. We have been deep into designing courses from the student’s perspective. And questions are coming up about how to get students to participate. This is where facilitation can help. A lot.
Here’s a tweet thread I wrote with 10 tried-and-tested facilitation strategies you can use to boost participation in your sessions.
What strategies do you use to get all group members to participate?
👎Forget Boring Lectures. Here’s a much better plan.
An article by Wes Kao called The State Change Method: how to deliver engaging live lectures on Zoom. Kao is co-founder of Maven, the first platform for cohort-based courses. She is an expert on how to deliver engaging student experiences at scale. Kao is a driving force behind a lot of the best examples of online learning out there. Thanks to @Merott for the link.
Here’s her article summed up in one neat graph👇
Sidebar on Emojis…
You may have noticed that I ❤️ emojis. That’s why I was excited to discover @Merott’s work. He is an emoji master 🤩. He curates amazing emoji summaries of articles for course creators. Check him out on Twitter and sign up for his Course Creator’s newsletter here.
Here is his emoji summary of Wes Kao’s article👇
💬Alternatives to “How Are You?”
I catch myself asking people “how are you” all the time. Just as soon as the three words come out of my mouth, I realize that for a lot of people that can be a complicated question to answer. It usually leads to a, “Fine thanks, how are you?” And then I actually never know how that person is, really.
That’s why I was happy to come across a tweet by Kat Vellos that I discovered in Khe Hy’s RadReads newsletter. Vellos is a speaker, facilitator, and author. She’s well known in facilitation circles. She’s an expert on building authentic connection. Vellos gives us 30 alternatives to try out. I especially like day 30: {just listen}.
🧊Icebreaker Live Session Update
What: The Quest’s first live event. A session for us to test out a platform called Icebreaker. Thanks to all of you who responded to the call-out!
When: During the week of May 10.
Please let me know your availability in this doodle poll by Sunday, April 25 and I’ll confirm in next week’s Quest. The date/time with the most votes wins.
Open to anyone who wants to join. No facilitation experience required!
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
I always love hearing your feedback and suggestions. Leave a comment below👇or hit reply to share your thoughts and ideas. Visit my website for ways we can work together here.
If you are enjoying The Quest, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with anyone you think might like it.
Until next week!
P.S. I loved hearing your comments on my new Creativity Kickstarter e-book. If you haven’t seen it yet you can download it for free here💥.
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