Designing learning experiences for facilitators: takeaways from writing a 2-day course
I recently co-created an agile team facilitation course with some fellow coaches. There was lots of content to create — 2 days worth — so we were looking around for inspiration. It was hard to find. Articles on how to train agile team facilitators were surprisingly rare. In an effort to plug that gap, I’m sharing my learnings with you. It’s all the things we wished we knew before we designed our facilitation course!
Whether you are looking to train/mentor facilitators yourself, or whether you are wanting to learn more about facilitation, this post will hopefully be of value to you.
When we trialed our new course with a group of willing early adopters, I had most of my expectations blown out of the water. I’d thought a lot beforehand about how to create learning experiences for the abstract, experiential topic of agile team facilitation. I had a handful of hypotheses ready to test. Some theories and hypotheses were disproved, others were reinforced surprisingly strongly.
Hypothesis: Group safety is created mostly at the beginning.
Wrong!
I thought if we hosted strongly at the beginning of the course, made people feel really welcome, then the group would reach peak safety early on. By group safety, I mean people feeling safe with each other, comfortable to be trying new things in front of each other.
The safety and trust continued to develop steadily throughout the two days. We did successfully achieve a good level of group safety right at the beginning, but that didn’t stop it from growing even more. As people got to know each other, as they developed their shared history, the trust levels kept climbing.
My takeaway — while the set up phase is important for a group to develop trust, it’s definitely not everything (it’s just the beginning).
Demonstrate as you go
“Don’t tell me, show me”.
We use quite a lot of different facilitation techniques and agile-derived ideas when we run any course… and it’s no different when the course topic just happens to be about agile team facilitation. There’s lots of opportunities to demonstrate techniques as the trainer, and keep up a meta-commentary as you go. For example:
- Run a group exercise.
- Meta-commentary: explain how you ran the group exercise.
Lynne Cazaly was my inspiration here. She does meta-commentary really well in her facilitation courses, and I’ve found it helpful as someone attending her course! So I already had a hypothesis that this would work. But I wasn’t expecting the results to be so good! In my experience it improved the flow of the course significantly, it improved learning outcomes, and it got positive feedback from our group of learners.
My takeaway — demonstrating by role modelling is surprisingly effective, will keep this up!
Learn by doing — the ultimate way for adults to absorb knowledge
Talking about facilitation and practicing new facilitation techniques with real people are quite different things.
We did lots of hands-on practice, and it was good, as expected.
It was good, AND we found something surprising — you can have too much of a good thing. We ran an entire day of agile team facilitation practice in small groups, which was more loosely held than other parts of the course. The practical day was quite hard for some folks. They were more responsible for creating their own learning experience from moment to moment, and that took more effort. They weren’t getting as much energy from us as instructors.
Practicing running a meeting isn’t the only way for someone to improve their facilitation skills. There’s also a lot of kinesthetic learning opportunities in simple games or exercises. For example, you can learn something about being neutral as a facilitator, by doing an individual exercise to identify your own cognitive biases. Once you’ve done a simple exercise and reflected on it, then you’ll be much more ready to practice it “in the wild” when you facilitate a meeting.
So the next time we run this course, we’ll break up the full day of class-led facilitation practice with more instructor-led games and exercises. That’ll also provide an easier pathway for people to move up the learning curve, before they are swimming in the deep end.
My takeaway — learning by doing is great, but a full day of practicing facilitation is probably a bit much. Break it up with some instructor-led, interactive content. That way, people aren’t having to bring all the energy and momentum themselves.
Learn one, do one, teach one
I used to work at a full immersion web development school called Enspiral Dev Academy, and “learn one, do one, teach one” was an education mantra I heard a lot there. I hadn’t had the chance to put it into practice much, but personal experience showed that I got a lot more familiar with a topic if I helped other people to learn it.
Coming into our course trial run, my hypothesis was that experienced facilitators could be stretched by taking on mentoring/teaching roles. And that would be ideal, because the course participants were bound to bring quite varied levels of experience.
Turns out, in reality that’s hard. It’s hard to make the jump from doing to mentoring/teaching, it’s hard to switch mode from practicing something yourself to helping others learn.
My takeaway — I think there’s still potential in giving experienced people mentoring/teaching roles, but we need to put more thought into how we can support people to transition into that role, and how we can create an environment that explicitly encourages peer mentoring.
Hypothesis: Fake case studies are the bomb.
We used a made up scenario like this: “you are in XYZ company that does ABC. Here’s some information about your team and your mission is blah blah blah. Congrats, your team wants you to be the facilitator!”. That was the pretend world for an entire day of role playing, when everyone practiced facilitating different team meetings.
Was our case study the bomb? Not really. A lot of people found our fake scenario confusing, and it ended up having a lot more holes than we thought. We didn’t put enough thought into it at the start, and we didn’t test it on ourselves. I imagine it will take multiple runs before we refine our case study into something awesome.
On the plus side, it’s great to be able to practice multiple meetings throughout a day while referring back to the same made up scenario. Ten out of ten for continuity and coherence!
My takeaway — fake case studies have a lot of potential, but they take time to get right.
The beauty of hindsight
We’ve talked about a number of surprises — the unexpected power of demonstrating by example, the observation that you can overdo kinesthetic learning, realising that group safety is ever evolving, the challenges of using case studies, and the strong support needed to encourage peer mentoring.
Looking at that list, it’s easy to say, I wish we knew that when we started! Ah, the beauty of hindsight. Hopefully by learning more about our mis-steps and unexpected findings, you’ll now be better equipped to carry on with your journey, be it learning facilitation or helping others to learn this awesome skill. Good luck!
Thanks to Katie Smith, Emil Scott and Andy Wong for co-creating this agile team facilitation course!