Using the Socratic Method as a Learning Facilitator

What is the Socratic Method? The Socratic Method uses questions to guide your student on a journey of discovery leading toward greater understanding or increased performance.
Although facilitation is about moving people to where they want to go, the simple truth is that nobody moves anywhere unless they move themselves. The Socratic Method is a way [...]

Delivery Diversity

How excited would you be about sitting down to dinner when every night you sat down to the same dish of luke warm green peas? Doesn’t sound all that appealing does it. Sadly, many teachers, trainers, and meeting leaders, particularly in virtual environments, rely on this approach day in and day out. They serve up [...]

Dethroning the God of Content

Welcome to the New Year! I hope you had a great holiday. Something about this change in the calendar offers the opportunity to take a fresh look at the world and our lives. With that in mind, I’d like to take a fresh look at learning content for trainers and facilitators.
It’s easy when we’re trying [...]

Ten Steps to Facilitating Major Life Change

As 2009 comes to a close, it seems like a good time to review where we’ve been and where we might like to go next year. It’s a time to look at changes we might want to make. Also as group leaders we’re often engaged in helping our clients make some kind of change. Whether [...]

Celebrate

As we move into Christmastime and the New Year, many of us reflect on the year gone by and the spirit of celebration is in the air. The act of celebrating naturally inspires a sense of abundance, blessing, gratitude and acceptance. So the celebrating can put us into a very positive, life-affirming frame of mind. [...]

Five Ways to Facilitate Group Conversations

With Christmas just around the corner, many of us will be attending parties, family and social events. And while we think of facilitation as a skill set used only by thusly initiated group change agents, the opportunity to use at least the basic elements of this skill set is available during ordinary social interactions.
Consider your [...]

Facilitating Ego Surrender

I was talking with my friend Darin Harris this morning about the impact facilitation has on our personal and spiritual development. As we were talking, a metaphor came to mind about the facilitator being an instrument. While I’ve used the instrument metaphor before, today it showed me something deeper than in the past. In this [...]

The Art of Not Doing

This holiday week, I want to present an idea that might easily be labeled as a sacrilege in this society. Ours is a culture of doing, even at an increasingly frenetic pace. It’s a common view that if we’re not doing something, we’re failing or lagging somehow. Everything in our world is about growing, progress, [...]

See Your Group’s Potential

Groups tend to evolve through a fairly predictable series of stages over time. A very popular model developed by Bruce Tuckman, calls these stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. I also particularly like author Scott Peck’s community building model which refers to these stages as: Pseudo- Community, Chaos, Emptiness, and True Community. In this week’s [...]

Effectively Designing Experiential Activities

When speaking to trainers and facilitators who see the value in delivery experiential activities, many wonder how to go about designing activities that meet the unique and changing needs of their groups. There are hundreds of experiential activities already designed for just about every purpose. However, we may not always be so fortunate as to [...]