Recently I was working with a financial organization who ran into similar challenges many other facilitators run into.
As facilitators we want our participants to learn as much as possible. To make sure they leave the workshop thinking “Wow, I’ve learned a lot”.
What can happen is that we overload our participants with too much information. We may feel like we taught them a lot, but what often happens is they walk away feeling overwhelmed and unsure as to what they learned.
As a facilitator, my belief is not that we teach people a bunch of information. They can easily read a book on a topic. What we can offer, that makes workshops magical, is to help people understand how to apply what was learned.
I do not believe knowledge is power. It's the application of that knowledge that is true power and that is the opportunity we have every time we facilitate a workshop.
So what do we do as facilitators?
Step 1. Slowww downnn, make sure people are truly digesting the material. We can do that with a variety of exercises that continually hit on different facets of the main point we are trying to make. It's not breadth but dept we are trying to achieve. It's not just learning, but understanding how to apply what was learned.
Step 2. Confirm what is being learned, which is what makes debriefs so important. Debriefs help confirm what was learned. There are many different ways to debrief and that will be a topic for another day.
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