Round-Up: Facilitation Tools
and resources for more participatory & inclusive gatherings
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I will be sharing essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing every other Thursday, and bonus snapshots from the road on alternating Sundays. Read more about the project here.
I just now realized that some of you left notes with your subscriptions, and I just read them all in one go. Thank you for being here and for your belief in this project (and in me!) <3
This week’s bonus is more of an informal blogpost and resource compilation of facilitation techniques I find helpful. Paid subscribers get early access, and then the paywall will be removed Sun Oct 22 for wider sharing.
Recently I was on the facilitation team for an online community call that we were hosting. We had just put people into breakout rooms for small group conversations. While I was listening to other people’s shares, I was also doing facilitator math in the back of my brain and feeling anxious about how I might lead the large-group sharing time that was coming up next. Luckily, when we got back to the main room, one of the other co-facilitators kept going with the agenda and smoothly coaxed some sharebacks into the large circle. She wrapped the sharing by having us all reflect on what we’d just heard/felt, type an image or line into the chat without hitting send, and then on the count of 3 hitting send all at once — to give us an impromptu group poem, which someone then read aloud for us. It was lovely.
Since last week’s “On Circles” essay was on my mind that day, I realized that most of my “big circle” facilitation is actually geared toward accommodating the inclusion of voices and neurotypes and personalities that might feel less comfortable in big circle. My “large group” facilitation tends to be variations of “how can we do small group in large group”, so I usually end up doing less overall in large group when I have control of the agenda.1
Here are a bunch of things for your facilitation/teaching/meeting toolbox if you want to mix things up from all large-group all the time.
Kagan Structures
I mentioned this in the Circles essay. I first encountered these when I was doing a post-bacc in K12 teaching (which I never completed). There are a bunch of different tools that are meant to increase cooperative learning in the classroom instead of overly relying on just calling on one student to answer. The one that sticks with me and that I use over and over again in different variations is: Think - Pair - Share. Basically: giving folks solo time to reflect, then having them share with a partner (or small group), and then doing report backs to large group for wider discussion. This helps prevent people from feeling put on the spot and gives space for both internal and external processors to engage. Even just that extra little bit of time for solo reflection time to e.g. “think of what you want to share back to the large group” does wonders for priming discussions.
“Poster Conversations”
I first encountered this at a training retreat for arts educators. On our final day, the facilitation team had put up chartpaper with various question prompts (e.g. “What are you taking away from this week?” or “The most challenging thing was…” or “Best moment…” or “I really appreciated when…”) up on the wall. There were two or three pages of each question. Folks were given markers, music was played, and we could go around and add thoughts and ideas to the chartpaper for a set amount of time. They also encouraged us to add emoji’s or reactions or thread conversations on the chartpaper.2 Once we were complete, we re-gathered as a large group to review what had transpired. This is a great alternative for removing the high-stakes nature of doing a go-around in the full circle and anxiously awaiting your turn and only getting one chance to say ‘the right thing’. This modality is also much quicker and more efficient and can include way many more voices than doing a large-group discussion or full-circle round.
Something similar to this is the World Café. People rotate as small groups to different conversations hosted by a human and a sheet of paper to capture notes. The host stays behind for multiple rounds and serves as cross-pollinator and synthesizer.
Intentions, Jam-style
At the Asian Diaspora Jam, the way we did intentions was: everyone was given 3 post-it’s and a marker. We wrote down 3 personal intentions (“I am going to…” type statements instead of goal-oriented). Then we walked around in the space and passed our post-it’s around, trading with people, until we ended up with 3 different post-its. Then we went around the circle reading the intentions we had in our hands. So all of the intentions were voiced into the space but anonymized, and it was powerful to read and try on saying others’ intentions as well as hearing your own in someone else’s voice. We then posted our intentions (post-its) all around the room to share the space with us and to help hold us for the week.
Also loved the way they did appreciations, but you can deep dive into Yes!Jams facilitation manual here. (The Asian Diaspora Jam which I wrote about was a combo of large-circle time and other modalities, and they leaned heavy into the collective work happening in full-group settings.)
Post-It’s
Post-it’s are a great tool overall for breaking things up and encouraging all to participate and contribute ideas without having to speak them into the circle (at first or at loudest). Design thinking brainstorming uses post-it’s prolifically (and now stereotypically) for this reason.
For more design-flavored-strategy kind of activities:
Gamestorming (book, activities, including a lot of ways to visualize the group convo to be able to help track the convo and incorporate more contributions vs when everything is audio only)
Seeds for Change’s participatory facilitation tools (PDF)
Been seeing more alternatives to brainstorming, which can also feel like a high-pressure activity in large groups
Somatics / Embodiment / Theater
Getting the body wisdom into the group allows for different modalities of expression and helps us take language / articulatible ideas off their pedestal. I’ve adapted a lot of theater games into my facilitation and spaceholding. (Sometimes without calling them such because people will resist a good icebreaker — myself included! The craft is in being intentional about why you are doing which warm-up activities. There’s a flow and a building-on that can make activities make sense to the body, and there’s an arbitrariness to “let’s pull an icebreaker out of the hat for the sake of icebreaker” that can undermine trust.) I first encountered Theater of the Oppressed from working as an after-school teacher with Creative Action in Austin — and continued my self-study via workshops (including one with Boal’s son) and T.O. groups (such as Embodying Change in Oakland).
I’ll just share one technique which I think is really easily adaptable: “Walk the Line” — you designate a line in the room, designate the two poles of a spectrum (e.g. “I love summer // I hate summer”), and then have people silently place their bodies where they fall in their agreement. Once folks are clustered / lined up, the group can look around and see where others are. You can elicit a few volunteers to share why they chose where to stand. You can start off with easy warm-up questions and then lead into ones that are more relevant to the topic(s) at hand. It’s a good way to get temperature checks on how folks are feeling about topics before launching into group discussion as well.
You can also adapt this into online meetings by using presentation slides, creating spectrographs, and asking folks to move a symbol/emoji/their name/a picture (depending on anonymity desired) onto the line. (And/or you can give your scale a range, e.g. “on a scale of 1-5, how are you feeling about…? Please type it into the chat.”)
For more on creative, engaging, participatory online facilitation, check out PeoplesHub trainings.
For more on theater games and theater of the oppressed, check out Michael Rohd’s Theatre for Community Conflict and Dialogue or Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors.
Gather.Town
Lol, I think I have introduced Gather.Town to just about every online community space I have been a part of at this point, as an alternative to zoom meetings — which are great, but which also take all the most awkward parts of large circles and cements them into a technological format…without even the comforting order of knowing who’s up next when sitting in a circle in shared space!
Gather Town is a platform for online meetings and co-working that includes little 8-bit characters walking around a virtual environment. The main draw of this platform for me for large gatherings is that you can walk away from a conversation. That may seem rude, but there is something freeing about having the autonomy to move yourself out of a situation if you need to — or just want to. (Which on Zoom,3 people sort of do by turning off their video, but that has so many different connotations+meanings, it ends up being a wash.)
We usually end up back on Zoom anyway because big money means it’s the smoothest and least glitchy platform for now. But/and I wanna keep embracing the glitch.
***
My wrist hurts from typing this on my keyboard on my futon because it’s the end of the week, and I didn’t want to sit at my ergo-set-up desk anymore, so I am going to stop here! There are a lot more I could go into, but that’s a good-enough round-up.
The takeaway is: there are lots of ways to make meetings participatory and inclusive. It’s an integral part of my facilitation style…aaaaaand that’s probably because I have the lived experience of finding normative top-down, talk-heavy, full-group-discussion meetings super uncomfortable and more challenging to engage in.4 It takes more than a request? invitation? directive? to “step up” to actually do it.5 We can scaffold fuller participation with good facilitation!
Good facilitation, inclusive facilitation, generative/productive/effective/elegant/beautiful facilitation is to know which activities to use when and for what effect, and it is a craft and an artform and a skill and a gift. I am grateful for all the teachers and people and trainers and facilitators and workshop leaders and elders and youngers and leaders I’ve learned from along the way as a participant and recipient of their spaceholding.
Thank you for reading! Dunno how many of you are facilitators or teachers or hold down spaces like this, but hope this is helpful to you or your orgs and communities! (This post is a preview for paid subscribers and will be available to the public starting Oct 22nd, if you want to share it in service of better meetings/gatherings.)
Fun to be aware of my own biases/defaults/inclinations as I hone my facilitation craft — a reflection activity suggested by AORTA in their Skill Up! workshops. They also have Facilitate for Freedom trainings, which goes into more liberatory facilitation that actively tend to power dynamics in group settings.
For general good facilitation tips, I also recommend adrienne maree brown’s Holding Change.
I must take this opportunity to mention that game designer and Mt Caz artist-in-resident Alex Roberts has a LARP called POP!, about online fetish communities, that uses handwritten ‘threaded conversations’ on chartpaper to great effect. ; )
This Hanna Thomas Uose piece on “The Trauma of Zoom” and the possibility of embodied zoom, written during beginning of pandemic, was something I referred to a lot the last few years.
"Tell me you’re autistic without telling me you’re autistic” is basically what my “On Circles” essay was circling around, huh? We’ll get into it more in next week’s essay!
Variations of the group agreement of “step up / step back” that are more inclusive of disabled bodies are: “move up / move back” and “take space / make space”. I am using “step up” here as shorthand because it colloquially has more exhortations and connotations associated with it in mainstream society beyond this context.