Greetings from Barcelona.
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest, your weekly round-up of tips and insights to help you design and lead exceptional virtual sessions that your group members will love❤️.
There is one word that makes facilitators cringe.
(OK he’s not a facilitator – he’s country singer Willy Jones. But that’s a pretty good cringe face😅).
It’s the opposite of fun and interactive.
We’ve all sat through hours of it. If you are not careful it can suck the life force right out of you. Most facilitators I know try to avoid it like the plague.
It begins with an L and has 7 letters. Anyone?
L–E–C–T–U–R–E
Yes!
Lectures have a bad reputation in the workshop world. That’s because lectures are misused and overused. They can turn into endless monologues. They put the presenter in the position of the sage on the stage. And they are hard to pay attention to. Especially online.
But are lectures really as bad as we make them out to be?
When used at the right time and in the right way, they can serve an important role in learning. They can give your group members the specialized knowledge they need to learn a skill. They help define key themes and concepts. And they can provide valuable insights into learning.
🤔How can you use lectures to do what they are good at? That’s our Quest for this week🔎
👉[When] Lectures Have their Place w/ Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt
👉The State Change Method: How to deliver engaging live lectures on Zoom w/ Wes Kao
👉Facilitating vs. Teaching vs. Lecturing w/ Sam Killermann and Meg Bolger
Let’s jump right in!
📚The Workshop Survival Guide: Lectures Have their Place
A chapter in the book The Workshop Survival Guide: How to design and teach workshops that work every time by Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt.
“Lectures are the scapegoat of the workshop world.”
As soon as I read that line I realized how biased I am against lectures. I can be so focused on learning-by-doing that I can miss delivering crucial pieces of knowledge.
Here’s what Fitzpatrick and Hunt say lectures are good at:
1/ Delivering pure “book” knowledge
2/ Supporting an upcoming exercise by establishing the theoretical foundations
3/ Supporting a completed exercise by extracting and discussing the lessons learned and takeaways.
Their advice for using lectures well?
👉Pair every piece of lecture with an exercise that attacks the same topic from a more interactive direction
👉Connect your talking pieces to your learning outcomes (and don’t go on tangents!)
👉Use lecture in small doses
Check out the book and free snippets 👉 here.
🙌Big thanks to Quest reader Mark Cheng who recommended Rob Fitzpatrick’s work.
🏛️The State Change Method: How to deliver engaging live lectures on Zoom
An article by online learning guru, and brand, and marketing expert Wes Kao. I know I am not the only fan of Wes Kao in the Quest. If you don’t know her I highly recommend checking her work out for insights into how modern audiences learn and interact online.
“Students don’t owe you their attention.”
Having established that as a fact, she goes on to break down the State Change Method. It’s an approach where you change your pace and methods every 3-5 minutes to break up the monotony of a monologue-style lecture.
Kao gives us a list of possible state changes:
- breakout rooms
- asking students to comment in the chat box
- switching from screen share back to gallery view mode, and vice versa
- asking students to unmute to chime in
- literally having anyone else talk
- putting a question on the screen to ask students to reflect silently
- cracking a joke and adding humor
- giving the mic to other students to share
- asking students to pause to internalize what was said
- Q&A
- group discussions
Check out the full article 👉 here.
Also, check out her brilliant Twitter thread on how to lead engaging meetings & presentations👇
 Wes Kao 🏛 |
⭐Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation: Facilitating vs. Teaching vs. Lecturing
A chapter in the book Unlocking The Magic of Facilitation by seasoned facilitators Sam Killermann and Meg Bolger.
Lecturing, teaching, and facilitating often get confused. Killermann and Bolger remind us that they are three distinct hats that educators can wear. Each has its perks. To know which to use when we have to first understand the differences between the three.
1/ LECTURE
Lecture consists of speaking directly to the learners in an uninterrupted way until their point is made.
Lecturing is helpful when:
👉There is something really specific that needs to be learned
👉You’re crunched for time and need to cover content
👉The educator holds specialized knowledge
👉There is a high ratio of learners to educators
2/ TEACHING
Teaching (the way they define it) is a co-created relationship between student and learner where the educator is ever conscious of the learners’ wants and needs.
Teaching is recommended when:
👉You have a sense of what material needs to be covered (and can cover more or less depending on the needs of your group
👉You know a lot about a particular thing, but you have a hunch that you aren’t the only one in the room who does
👉The group of learners is big but not so big that you couldn’t learn all of their names in a few minutes
3/ FACILITATING
Facilitating is everything that lecturing and teaching aren’t. It’s decentralized and it requires everyone’s involvement. It’s often activity-based and can take a variety of forms like games, discussion, reflection, dialogue, and more.
Facilitating is perfect when:
👉You can leave most of the decision-making about the exact things a group will learn to the group itself
👉You have plenty of time
👉You are drawing out knowledge and experience that learners already have as a community (they need help in realizing it)
Their advice?
👉Be intentional with your choices of when to use which method. If you are going to use lectures, use “mini-lectures” scattered throughout your session.
Check out their book 👉 here. They also have pay-what-you-want and pay with a tweet or Facebook post options.
Check out their free online resource for facilitators called Facilitating XYZ.
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Creatively yours,
