Excellent Facilitation: Embrace Challenge

Since excellent facilitation is a process, it is important to understand that there will be difficult times ahead.

One of the keys to excellent facilitation is knowing that criticism will come – and that can be good. We cannot grow without criticism. Sometimes, critical thinking is seen as a challenge, but oftentimes it comes for the best possible reasons.

In a society where criticism is often a one way street, we must be aware of the outcomes of our actions, embrace these challenges, and learn from them. Following are several strategies for fostering critical thinking with participants.  

Seven Ways to Encourage Critical Thinking

1. Use think-pair-share. Have individual thinking time, discussion with a partner, and presentation back to the group.
2. Ask follow-ups. Why? Do you agree? Can you elaborate? Can you give an example?
3. Withhold judgment. Respond to answers without evaluating them and ask random group members to respond to them.
4. Summarize. Asking a participant at random to summarize another’s point to encourage active listening.
5. Think out loud. Have participants unpack their thinking by describing how they arrived at an answer.
6. Play devil’s advocate. Asking participants to defend their reasoning against different points of view.
7. Support participant questions. Asking participants to formulate their own questions.    

These are the plainest steps I can write down right now for becoming an excellent facilitator. There is plenty of information about facilitation online, and some of it is good.

This is meant for those who want to be excellent facilitators; read on to learn more!

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