Apply Facilitation in Trainings

After two days’ fruitful TTT training, Itry to apply what I learn from that as possible as I can. Jeff told us oneimportant thing in training is to engage audience. There are several ways toachieve that. Let’s review firstly.

1.      Have a chat with friends

2.      Tell lots of true stories

3.      Show vulnerability

4.      Ask & Listen

5.      Force audience participation

This time I am going to deliver a lecture ina middle school to popularize psychology knowledge. There will be about 100students to participate. Before that, I plan a lot and prepare a lot. I assumethat students usually perform very well during the class. Teacher ask questionsfirst. Students raise their hands. After gaining permission from teacher,students stand up and answer questions politely. It is like an officialprocedure. I plan to do something different.

I put variety in that lecture. That isfacilitation! I divide all students into groups. Every group has a leader. Themembers of each group is ten to the most. Finally there will be ten groupstotally.

The lecture is divided into three parts.First one is a brief introduction of the theme. Second is by asking severalquestions about the theme, group members will discuss the theme thoroughly andshare on the stage. Third is by watching certain video, I try to facilitatethem to the key point they will learn from the lecture.

What happened finally is that it was a chaos! Students was happy but the whole session to some extent lost control.The teacher (not me) was busy in putting back the classroom order. I was glad to notice that students were fully engaged or should say too much engaged. And another thing is that when I invited all the other students to give a big applause to the student who answer the question. Usually he/she was very happy and satisfied and become more concentrated on the rest lecture. And another important thing is that Facilitation is not suitable among young students. The number of attendee should around 10 persons. Otherwise facilitator will lose control and cannot take care of everyone or pull back their attention.

These reminds me that during our training,Jeff mentioned trainers should take control of the training session. So I askedadvice from Jeff. And the answers surprised me!

“With such young kids, as long as youengage their minds, they learn.”

“Traditional teaching methods all over theworld expects a logical child to sit and listen. That doesn’t work too well. Ifeel you’ve done the right thing and now, learn how to control kids bydistracting them when you start to lose control, and bring them back.”

Finally, I understand I can distract kidsby asking questions or clapping hands or repeating classroom rules (which isworse but could be work).

This answer beyond my imagination. For trainers, who is your audience? I guess from this lecture, I have more thinking of this questions. Trainers adjust themselves according to the audience themselves and also their reaction towards the training. The training session process is like a flow.

And more importantly, practice makesperfect. The more I put what I learned from Jeff, the more I can absorb theknowledge and deepen my understand of a trainer. From this lecture, I also findsomething out of my expectation. Facilitation can be used as a tool to testyoung students about what they learned before and how much they mastered.

So dear future trainers, practice practice and practice.