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A facilitator helps groups of people to enable them to interact more effectively in a wide range of situations and occupations, including workplaces, organizational planning, leisure and health activities and community development. Facilitation is an emerging and exciting profession.
The facilitator's task of opening up discussion, getting ideas into the open and setting broad future direction is essential if a group is to reach consensus on a particular outcome and it is now one of the key techniques used in meetings and workshops. Facilitation Made Easy provides a practical introduction to the essential skills needed and will help readers develop a facilitation style that is unbiased and enables control without being overpowering. With detailed examples, proven tips for success, checklists and a self assessment guide to help readers test their own personal approach to facilitation, the book will help readers to: Understand the facilitator's role Develop the ideal structure for workshops and meetings Control agendas and help to focus the outcome of meetings Deal with difficulties. This third edition also includes a new chapter on facilitating virtual meetings, explaining the mechanics of virtual teams, the pros and cons of virtual meetings, use of technology and tips on setting up, facilitating and participating in virtual meetings
This toolkit of facilitation techniques should provide readers with all they need to develop and hone their facilitation skills. Complete with case studies of the techniques in action Practical Facilitation covers traditional techniques and many new approaches such as the use of music, drama and storytelling.
The Secrets of Facilitation delivers a clear vision of facilitation excellence and reveals the specific techniques effective facilitators use to produce consistent, repeatable results with groups. Author Michael Wilkinson has trained thousands of managers, mediators, analysts, and consultants around the world to apply the power of SMART (Structured Meeting And Relating Techniques) facilitation to achieve amazing results with teams and task forces. He shows how anyone can use these proven group techniques in conflict resolution, consulting, managing, presenting, teaching, planning, selling, and other professional as well as personal situations.
Have you ever found yourself at the front of a room, calling on the same two hand-raisers, zipping through text-heavy slides, burdened with all of the information you are trying to cover -- and wondered frantically why your audience seems so disengaged (and maybe even resentful)? This approach to running meetings, workshops, and classes is extremely common, yet it's largely ineffective because this one-way flow of information doesn't inspire innovation, inclusivity, or buy-in. Raise the Room reminds us: there's a better way! Author Eva Jo Meyers proposes that we shift from a talking-head model to a more inclusive model when we lead engagements, ensuring that everyone in the room has a voice and an opportunity to share their wisdom. Drawing on her career as a leader and professional facilitator, she describes the principles of Transformational Facilitation and how to apply them in real life. The goal: to help you create spaces in which every person feels motivated and can thrive as a fully included and indispensable member of the group. The book is organized into five sections, each one providing actionable tips and tricks you can harness to breathe new life into your events: Be Prepared: How to generate clear goals and objectives, schedule breaks, and create useful handouts Create a Safer Environment: Ideas for setting a welcoming ambiance, creating a braver space for introductions, and building stronger teams Transfer Power to the Participants: Strategies to help enforce equal airtime, access prior knowledge, and minimize lectures Use Active Learning and Engagement Strategies: How to integrate art projects, videos, pair-shares, quotes, and research to stimulate deep thinking Motivate Action: Ideas that enable participants to follow through on their plans through continued support, networking, and exit tickets Whether you're leading meetings, classes, workshops, or simply running the occasional small-group brainstorming session, you can immediately apply the practical tools in this book to create a more memorable and meaningful experience for everyone. Your participants will thank you -- because rather than trying to lead the room, you'll be empowering the room to lead. Join the movement to Raise the Room and change the world -- one engagement at a time.
The covid-19 crisis accelerated virtual collaboration exponentially, creating an instant need for virtual facilitation skills. People and organizations have started on this journey, but do not yet have the experience and competencies to use this medium for effective and energetic collaboration. Virtual Facilitation will show you how to have successful virtual events, virtual meetings, virtual workshops and training. Packed full of tips, insights and real case studies, the author's practical approach to virtual facilitation will show you how to effectively learn the skills needed to suceed. This book will also cover: The role of the facilitator, and what is expected The design of the process How to avoid common mistakes Implementation and influencing behaviour Virtual Facilitation will show you how to plan for virtual events, how to develop skills to be able to host virtual meetings, virtual courses, virtual training, virtual workshops, and virtual larger events to meet 21st century needs.
Facilitators exist wherever learning happens. Anyone who works in a community organization, a corporation, a government, or a healthcare environment can end up leading a workshop, running a course, or otherwise facilitating others’ learning. Facilitators can also be consultants or post-secondary instructors who have been hired to lead one course or more. However, many people haven’t been trained in how to facilitate learning effectively. Design to Engage is a “how to” book that will help you become an effective designer and facilitator of learning events. You will: • learn about facilitation roles and responsibilities; • discover what good learning experiences look like; • plan for and design effective learning events using practical, straightforward design strategies; • raise your awareness about how to create inclusive, comfortable environments. Along with specific recommendations on developing the skills and strategies necessary to be an effective facilitator, you’ll find priceless advice on creating participatory activities to keep learners involved, assessing participants’ learning, gathering feedback about learning experiences, and how to grow your facilitation practice. The more engaging and interactive you make your learning events, the more people will actually learn from them. Practical, accessible, and jam-packed with tools to support facilitators to create impactful learning experiences, Design to Engage is a revelation and an inspiration.
As group facilitators, we can use methods like Open Space Technology, Future Search, and World Café to reliably evoke "group magic" when working with larger groups. Yet how can we tap into the generative power of self-organization when working with smaller groups - especially ones facing complex and conflict-laden issues? In From Conflict to Creative Collaboration: A User's Guide to Dynamic Facilitation, collaboration consultant Rosa Zubizarreta describes a ground-breaking facilitation method for transforming unproductive group friction into effective teamwork and innovation. Dynamic Facilitation's agile approach draws task groups into a co-creative "flow zone" - where participants create practical and innovative solutions while building trust, empathy, and authentic community. Some of the distinctive features of this approach include welcoming solutions initially and throughout the process, as a form of rapid prototyping, and using empathic listenint to create safety for both solutions (creative thinking) and concers (critical thinking). As we create a "map" of the different perspectives that are present, we support participants' own ability to recognize patterns and create new meaning.
Have you ever been involved in a project that didn’t require a meeting? Neither have we. Well-run project meetings allow teams to get through the maze of distractions and obstacles to achieve results. Unfortunately, many project meetings aren’t well-run—they are viewed, by team members, as unproductive, tedious, wastes of precious time. But you can change that. The Project Meeting Facilitator contains practical techniques and practices that will help you facilitate our meetings more effectively, transforming them into well-planned, well-managed journeys that engage the team while achieving the intended goals.
