Post your list of Top Ten Facilitation Skills, including a brief rationale for each item on your list. Identify the skills about which you feel most confident and those that you most need to improve. Seek advice from your Walden colleagues about how you might grow and develop your skills. Finally, share your evaluation of the facilitation skills you observed in the Tuning Protocol Meeting and how they contributed to the group’s work. Be sure to include information from this week’s Learning Resources to support your ideas.
Facilitators of professional development need to know their audience, the culture, and the goals of the group in order to plan effective professional learning activities. An effective facilitator has a variety of skills and strategies to adapt and apply with different types of groups and for different purposes. For example, consider how the skills that you need as a facilitator might be different for conducting a staff meeting versus a small focus-group meeting. At times, coaching is appropriate; at times, building a culture first is critical. As you complete your assignments this week, think about various contexts in which you might use and modify different facilitation skills and strategies.
If you have not already begun to do so, take a moment to compile your list of “Top Ten Facilitation Skills” based on this week’s Learning Resources. Write a 1- to 2-sentence rationale that captures the importance of each skill for effective facilitation. In which area(s) do you feel most confident related to these skills and in which area(s) do you most need to learn and develop?
Next, bring to mind the “Tuning Protocol Meeting” segment, consider the importance of the facilitator’s role in that meeting, and evaluate how the facilitator’s skills and use of strategies contributed to the effectiveness of the meeting. Which skills on your “Top Ten” list did you observe in the meeting?
