Teaching, training, or facilitating with someone else is very different from doing the same work on your own. Here are some tips to ensure you are successful: Check in with each other in advance. As soon as you know you will be working with each other, get together to plan. You need to agree on […]
Walter Brueggemann is a scholar of the Hebrew Scriptures. He says: Moses was not engaged in a struggle to transform a regime (in Egypt ); rather his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible. THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION p. 21 Reading this, I was blown away! I saw for […]
Using guidelines during a learning or work event can be extremely helpful (and sometimes paramount to a successful session!). Below are a few things to keep in mind for ensuring they are relevant, needed, and meaningful. Use Guidelines for especially difficult groups or topics, multi-day events, or when you think issues around power may arise. […]
You are going to have to walk slowly to keep up with me! is my warning offered to those who dare to go for a walk with me these days. Another new axiom I am living by is Keep your eyes off the clock! Both of these speak to my predilection for “busy," for “productive," […]
By Jeanette Romkema and Christine Little Interpreters are crucial partners when facilitating dialogue in multilingual groups. The goal of any training, workshop, presentation or meeting is to build understanding. This is much harder when the facilitator doesn’t speak the language of the group, or a subset of the group does not speak the main language […]
When designing any learning event, the Dialogue Education 8 Steps of Design method demands that you develop in advance a deep understanding of who will participate, taking into account their individual experience and needs so that you can tailor the design specifically for them; any learning event that makes too many assumptions about the participants […]
When you’re designing any kind of learning event – a workshop, seminar, class, meeting – one of the most important components of your design is your learning tasks, those elements of the event in which the learners do something with the content they’ve set out to learn. For learning that lasts, use the 4-A Model, a foolproof […]
Too much information (TMI), or information overload, is a spot many curriculum designers find themselves in when preparing for a new workshop or course; even the most experienced person can hit TMI when he or she is taking on a new teaching topic. Sometimes before we are ready and able to narrow down the content we're using […]
I’m the president of a non-profit board of trustees and before I took the helm our meetings were primarily show-and-tell sessions: the director showed and told and we sat passively and listened, contributing ideas when we were asked. That was then. Fast-forward to now. I remember the moment when, after months spent introducing some SUREFire […]
As a facilitator, it is important to get feedback from the group you’re working with to hear what they think of both the content they are learning and how they are learning it. Here are some ideas for gathering feedback that don’t take much time. For each of these, you only need to hear a […]