Confidence in facilitating learning – Stefan Fourie and Associates

If you are a facilitator of learning, the following points could help give you more confidence in facilitating learning sessions:

Be transparent/open and honest with the group about why you’re doing particular activities, or that you’re experimenting with something new – this makes you more part of the group and helps them learn about facilitation as well.
Have clear goals, as mentioned earlier – don’t learn for the sake of learning. Know what you want to say and what you want out of a particular session.
Listen for emotions – try to read the group’s emotions and reactions, and try to see what is not being said, or who is not speaking – try to bring those out through good questions.
Reflect and summarise – your job as facilitator is often to take, generalise, and summarise what participants are saying about a particular topic to help the conversation to arrive at a good conclusion.
Ask good questions. Here are some examples to get more clarification or to go deeper, or to guide the conversation back to the topic at hand:
- Can you give me an example of that?
- Can you say more about that?
- How did you come to that conclusion?
- How do you see that relating to [whatever topic you’re covering]?
- What do you think a solution to that could be?
- Have you experienced something like that before? What was it?

A last practical tip on facilitation: go with the flow!