Facilitation for Beginners
A tried-and-tested half-day session to introduce newcomers to facilitation.
Have you been asked to share your facilitation knowledge with colleagues? Or perhaps you are planning to train youth for a future of excellent teamwork?
This 3-part workshop covers the basics, allowing participants to experience facilitation while building the skills to facilitate themselves.
Objectives
- Learning about facilitation while experiencing it directly.
- Sharing basic tools to the point where participants feel confident guiding activities themselves.
- Discussing in a group setting how to make meetings more effective.
- Co-creating a basic toolkit of methods, skills and activities.
- Discussing in a group setting how to make meetings more effective.
- Leaving with individual action plans for concrete next steps in learning and practicing facilitation.
Materials
Attachments
- Effective meetings.jpg
- Revised IAF Core Competencies - December 6 2021.pdf
Instructions
This session is designed to introduce facilitation to newbies. In half a day, it gives participants the insights they need to understand what facilitation is and how they can apply it in their life in a very practical way. Participants leave with knowledge of basic tools they can take and use to improve team work, meetings and events.
During the session, the facilitator builds opportunities to:
- Share their knowledge and experience.
- Have participants experience tools directly.
- Practice facilitative skills such as active listening.
- Discuss facilitation concepts with the group.
The session is ideal as a first step in a journey towards mastery of facilitation, but can also stand alone as a support to disseminating facilitative skills among teams, managers and staff. It also works well with youth, e.g. young professionals in a soft skills programme or higher education students learning how to better work in teams.
The assumption is that an experienced facilitator will lead this session, with the aim of sharing their knowledge with beginners. You are surely qualified to lead it if you:
- Have some experience facilitating groups and meetings.
- Are comfortable in a classroom setting.
- Have some familiarity with basic theories and frameworks around group dynamics.
- Enjoy reflecting on the whys and hows of the tools you use.
The entire session can also be run in a team of two, with one person mainly leading practices and the other mainly providing content (there are two moments that center around presentations, one introducing facilitation, the other on effective meetings).
In this case, it makes sense to have one member of the team with more facilitation experience, while the other will be more in the trainer/teacher role.
The entire session can easily be adapted to remote/online environments. You can read more about how to do this in the accompanying blog post.
Author
At SessionLab, we are passionate about facilitation. We believe good workshop design leads to better collaboration, enabling people to achieve great things. SessionLab is the go-to platform for session design, with an agenda planning tool, library of facilitation resources and vibrant community for facilitators. It enables facilitators to streamline workshop design through drag-and-drop scheduling, automatic timing and seamless sharing with clients and colleagues.
