It was a pleasure to facilitate a blended model facilitation skills workshop over the last several weeks for a non-profit organizational client.
During the final session, I facilitated the Liberating Structure What, So What, Now What (W3), to invite participants to look back on the sessions, to capture some of what they have experienced and learned.
Across the one in-person day and three virtual sessions, people reflected on the fact that learning can be active, engaging, and collaborative—without relying on long slide decks or one-way presenting. They practiced new facilitation activities, experienced different ways of engaging learners in person and online, and saw how much wisdom already exists in the room when participants are invited to contribute.
Here were some of the participants’ key takeaways, which of course had formed part of the content and discussions of the workshop:
- Start with purpose and learning outcomes
- Design before building the slide deck
- Use activities intentionally, not just for variety
- Trust that participants can help generate the content and learning
- Make space for people to try, reflect, and grow
By the end, participants were naming concrete changes they wanted to make:
- Moving away from slide-heavy sessions
- Planning with participants in mind
- Paying more attention to gathering feedback
- Continuing to build confidence with activity-based facilitation
It’s future intentions like this from participants that help keep me energized to keep showing up and offering learning sessions for people wanting to increase their skills in facilitating either workshops or meetings. And the client reports back that evidence is already starting to arise that their employees who have been part of the workshop are making changes for the better across their meetings and workshops. Yes!
Learning facilitation is an iterative practice that we all grow in over time—me included! (And I’ve now written two books in the field.) I loved working with and learning from this group over the time we had together.
AI Disclosure: This blog post was first written by AI, after asking it to summarize PDFs of the three Padlet boards of participant-generated sticky notes as part of the W3 activity. The post was then revised, added to, and checked by a real human, Beth Cougler Blom, at BCB Learning. We use AI to augment our work, not do it for us. 🤪