Facilitating Groups Part II: Facilitation Techniques

Facilitate and design higher quality workshops, meetings, or classes. Follow along with our facilitator tools online training or group facilitation training bundle today. Create a plan today that you can even facilitate with a group tomorrow!


Objective: In this workshop, you will learn how to get people talking and get them more engaged.

Activity – You will:

  • Understand verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal communication.
  • Understand the importance of including activities.
  • Reflect on some of the best group activities you have had.

Product – You will create and develop:

  • Qualities of good group facilitation you have seen in the past.
  • A vision for your group.

Outcome – You will learn how to:

  • Use verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal skills to better communicate with your group.
  • The importance of including activities for learning.
  • Foster group relationships while accomplishing a task.

EMAIL DARIN TO BRING THIS LIVE WORKSHOP TO YOUR GROUP

Facilitating Groups is a series of workshop topics designed to help people better facilitate events and meetings so that participants learn, are engaged and get more accomplished. Participants will learn how use best practice techniques and tools to more confidently and successfully facilitate others.

Facilitating Groups Part I: Facilitation Theory
Facilitating Groups Part II: Facilitation Techniques
Facilitating Groups Part III: Facilitation Tools
Facilitating Groups Part IV: Facilitation In Practice


Facilitating Groups is also available as a blended online video course. Here are some reflections from students who have done our online facilitation training program.

“Thank you so much for this module on group facilitation. I will be facilitating a lot of group reflections and discussions for a leadership development program. By learning all these tools and activities to engage a group of students, I feel more confident in my role as a peer mentor. I totally agree with the Experiential Learning Cycles. Reflections are an active way of thinking about one’s past experience and apply what one learns in the past to present or future situations. I will strive to build up everyone’s comfort level and develop relationships among team members. Then, I will get down to the task and encourage reflections and discussions. The Cone of Learning Model shows that people remember more of what they say and do, so my goal is to get everyone in the group to reflect and share.
Among the tools and activities, brainrain stands out to me. I thought it is interesting to give people time to think and jog down ideas. A lot of times, facilitators tend to ask questions and expect immediate responses. The result is often that “awkward silence.” We can turn that silence into an opportunity for people to think independently and deeply about the questions if given specific instructions.”

“Something that really stood out to me was the drastic difference in things you remember simply based on how you came across the information.
After 2 weeks you can remember 90% of what you say and do so it is important to be engaging and active when learning. A lot more learning occurs. People learn in different ways and have different types of intelligence. You need to remember this because not everyone would benefit from the same form of learning. You need to try to engage all different types of learning. The smaller the group, the better. It’s easier to engage people. So you must always take into consideration the group size you’re going to be dealing with so you can know which may be the best way to get your points across. Simple things such as name cards can be a good thing because calling people by name makes it more engaging and personal. People like when their professors for example know them by a first name basis.
Act, reflect, conceptualize, apply, and then act again and so on.
Para verbal shows that you’re very into something and it would help engage your audience as well. Verbal, para verbal and nonverbal are all important aspects to consider when presenting. You should always be conscious of these things.
It is important to ease people out of their comfort zone, help build relationships and have activities. These things will help make your presentation more engaging and effective. If the group is small enough let everyone introduce themselves.
Overall, I thought this workshop was very helpful. All the points seemed to be common-sense but these are things that people take for granted and can easily forget how important these simple things are.”

“I thought that this workshop was immensely helpful and gave me lots of wonderful ideas for my round table discussion. Having never been comfortable with public speaking, I feel like I now have the tools to successfully complete my discussion. One of my favorite things that I learned were all of the tools that can be used for introductions. These tools will hopefully allow me to get the participants engaged and make them a part of the discussion. I also hope to use the tools to get to understand my audience better and provide them with information to help them become effective leaders. Overall, I learned a great deal from this video. I will definitely use what I have learned and apply it to my discussion.”

The Facilitation topic area is great for people who need to teach something or get results with a group. Workshops will introduce tools and techniques for facilitating group discussion and activities. Participants will engage in different types of facilitation and discussion and identify the challenges that they expect to face. This is relevant for both students and professionals. I show people how I do what I do in these workshops.

Click here to see all programs in the Facilitation topic area.

Scroll to Top