Evaluation of the First Round of Facilitation

Present in class (413 words)

Sorry I didn’t get this on the blog earlier, but I didn’t get a chance before work this morning. Nevertheless, here we go:

First of all, I agree that we did a great job of pumping out our first mini-facilitation of the training. Everyone held their own and no one collapsed under the scrutiny of brilliantly acted 6th grade class.

In looking at my own work last night, I can certainly see areas of success and areas that need further work. For one, I realize now that I wasn’t really cognizant of my nervousness before the presentation. Thus, I wasn’t ready to take a step back on my rapid speech. As seen, I can be a bit of a fast talker, but it tends to only comes about when I’m a) excited, b) nervous, or c) trying to bring up the energy in a room. Now, I can see how all three were present in this situation, so I’m really just chalking it up to a bit of this and that and planning on hearing from all of you if it continues to present itself as a problem throughout the facilitation process.

Another area of issue was in my preparation of the facilitation and problems the presentation ran into as a result. The plan of action was probably too dependent upon open ended questions that didn’t feed quite enough information to the class to get them talking. Thus, there ended up being too many tangents and not enough ropes to corral those tangents back in. Yet, on the flip side, it was pointed out that I perhaps reacted too far to the other end in that I came back with a little too much lecturing to get things back on track. Yes it might have been in the right movement toward redirection, but in all reality, I ended up waxing poetic just a little too long. I’ll definitely be the first to admit that this an admitted weakness that I have when it comes to my love of diversity issues and balancing that wordy love with a teen’s attention level (it was a fun learning curve for me last school year). Certainly a goal for improvement during the coming weeks.

Overall, not terrible. I think people reacted well to what we had to say and wanted to be involved, even if it was the third time we’d covered the information. Or maybe you’re all just very polite. Either way works for me.

Matt