Facilitators Guide

tutorials
Published

August 21, 2022

Thank you for volunteering as a facilitator! This guide is designed to describe your role and provide helpful tips for facilitating.

Main Facilitator

The role of the main facilitator is to serve as the emcee for the session. They are responsible for providing a land acknowledgement at the beginning of the session, leading the group introduction/check-in, and managing the agenda for the session. A session agenda will be provided to you, along with a land acknowledgement script and opening and closing group activities. If you would like to customize any of these elements, just let the session organizers know and they would be happy to help customize it for you!

Zoom Facilitator

The role of the Zoom facilitator is to manage session attendees, breakout rooms and pairing challenge buddies for one-on-one conversations. Depending on the session, you will have one or two rounds of breakout rooms to organize, or you may have several breakout rooms to organize for our one-on-one sessions. You will be made the Host in Zoom in order to create breakout rooms, assign breakout facilitators to specific rooms, and provide time warnings before attendees need to return to the main breakout room. You will be provided with a list of registered attendees directly before the session in order to track attendance and plan breakouts. If you are responsible for creating new challenge buddy pairings (this will be made clear in the session agenda) you will need to record who was paired up so they can be matched again at the following session.

Breakout Facilitator

The role of the breakout facilitator is to help guide discussion in the breakout rooms. Discussion questions will be provided to help you guide the conversation and provide prompts for the attendees to consider. There is no need to ensure every question is addressed during the breakout, or that every attendee addresses every question - the conversation can organically grow and evolve based on what people in your breakout room are most interested in. Breakout facilitators should begin each breakout by going to each individual in the room and asking them to provide their thoughts and responses to the discussion questions, or any other thoughts that arose during the first part of the meeting. The purpose of this round is to give each person the space to offer their thoughts, before moving into a more free-flowing format. After this round is complete, the conversation can flow more organically, and the breakout facilitator should help keep the conversation on track, connect ideas that come up from the group to prompt further discussion, and stimulate conversation if there is a lull. It is helpful to provide the discussion questions in the chat when you enter the breakout room so that other attendees can remember what the discussion questions are.

Facilitation tips (adapted from Facilitating Group Discussions)

  • Start the discussion with going around and letting everyone share their thoughts/comments about the topic. The goal is to give everyone space to speak without requiring them to. There should not be pressure for everyone to speak; anyone can pass when their turn comes. You should make sure your participants panel and the chat window is open as the facilitator, so you can see if people have provided non-verbal feedback. An example of introducing such a structure would be:
    • “We’ll start the discussion by going around and giving everyone a minute or two to share their thoughts to make sure everyone has a chance to be heard. Then we’ll open the floor to anyone who wants to respond or has any additional thoughts they want to share. If you don’t feel like sharing, feel free to pass when your turn comes. If you don’t wish to speak you can provide feedback through the participants panel on Zoom by selecting the red x for”no”.”
  • It is not necessary to get through every discussion question - see them as a guide to shaping the discussion. You can offer them up as questions for the group to consider (it helps to share the questions in the chat) and you can allow the group to focus on the questions/topics that are the most interesting to them.
  • If the discussion isn’t flowing, ask follow-up and/or probing questions, such as:
    • “Can you say a little more about…”
    • “Can you give us an example?”
    • Offer a comment and ask for agreement or disagreement from the group
  • If someone is monopolizing the discussion, try redirecting with statements like:
    • “I’d like to hear what others have to say about that” referring to what the speaker just said
    • Ask another person a question when the speaker takes a pause
    • Explain that you appreciate their viewpoint, but you would like to make sure everyone has a chance to contribute
  • If someone keeps changing the subject or goes on tangents:
    • “That’s really interesting, how do you feel about….” and then redirect to the topic
  • If people keep interrupting:
    • Try to manage the conversation order, such as “Okay, first Erin, then Malik, then Zahara”
    • Try to re-establish the conversation order “You make an interesting point. I’d like to finish hearing from Noor, and then I know that Ben wanted to add thoughts as well”
  • If someone expresses judgement/hostility towards another individual:
    • Remind everyone that open science is a process, and that we are all here because we are interested in incorporating this into our work