Train Facilitators and Finalise Schedule

In the days or weeks before your short course takes place, it is vital that you gather the whole team together to provide training. The purpose of this training is to build a cohesive team and to equip your team with the resilience and skills needed to deliver the short course without compromising their own mental health.

Training your Facilitators

Facilitation is the art, science and intuition of helping a group to understand their common objectives and to plan how to achieve these objectives. Because the process of facilitation is to provide leadership without taking the reins, the facilitator stays neutral. Anyone can become better at facilitation through attention and practice. To facilitate means “to make easy,” and the more people in a group who have facilitation and other process skills, the better any session will run. In the most successful groups, all members take responsibility for co-creating a good session, bringing facilitation qualities forward even when they are not in the official role of facilitator.

Facilitators are the travel guides for participants, so they need to understand the learning journey, not just their sessions.

We recommend that regular training sessions and communication channels are open between you and your facilitators in the weeks and months prior to your short course taking place. Whether you're all co-located or spread across the globe presents different challenges and opportunities when doing this. If the team's dispersed, special care needs to be taken to ensure all team members feel included, motivated and part of the team. This involves scheduling meetings at times which suit everyone's time zones, utilising video calls and maybe recording information sessions for team members to study at their leisure.

When your facilitators gather face-to-face in the days prior to your short course taking place, this will likely be the first time the team is all together, so energies will be running high and excitement will be in the air. Based on feedback from previous short course organisers, UWC International recommends that a minimum of 2 days are dedicated to facilitator training prior to your short course taking place. An external facilitator may help to develop the team connections.

This training should be face-to-face and interactive, so ideally all facilitators, guest speakers and any on-site coordinators should come together at the short course location a few days prior to the course taking place and take part in various training:

  • Thoroughly learn about UWC values and mission

For example, external facilitators need to understand that micro-aggressions and certain language cannot be used in a short course.

  • Thoroughly understand roles during the short course and carry out initial tasks

For example, the fire warden will need to understand where the exits are and examine the building prior to the participants arriving.

  • Get to know each other and bond as a team through activities and informal conversations.

Much like the facilitation skills which will be showcased in the coming days when once your participants have arrived, you will need to facilitate team-building among your facilitators.

  • Set up the venue

Some venues will largely be equipped, but in some cases the organiser will need to unpack many resources and get to know the facilities.

  • Safeguarding

The DSL, who will by this stage have completed their mandatory online training, must feedback to the whole short course team (including all facilitators and guest speakers), ensuring that all team members are appropriately informed of the policy and trained to an appropriate degree (i.e. what to look out for).

  • A thorough brief on participants

This must be set at a level which does not compromise the participants' confidentiality, but does work to best protect the best interests of the participant. For example if you have a participant who comes from a very wealthy family, this does not need to be shared among all team members, but if you have a participant with access needs, it would be in their best interest to share this so the team are inclusive to this person.

  • Thoroughly understand the curriculum and schedule, and where each person should be at any given time

Further information on this is provided in the section below.

Facilitator Training Handbook

Factiliation Training Handbook

Training Ideas

You may wish to develop a manual for all of your facilitators to engage with at the facilitator training or even beforehand, to get them into the mindset of facilitating your short course. For inspiration, below is the Facilitation Manual, created and shared with UWC International by Clara Freudenberg of Building a Sustainable Future, Germany, 2018.

Copy of Facilitation Guide - Clara Freudenberg.pdf

One quick activity is speed feedback, provided by Together for Development, eSwatini, 2017.

Speed-feedback.pdf

Finally, below is a primer activity to enhance facilitation skills, provided by Lukas Wallrich.

facilitation_primer.pdf

For further team building resources, please consult the Curriculum Development section where activities, such as icebreakers, can be applied to team building among facilitators as well as participants. There are free facilitation tools available via Partners for Youth Empowerment (PYE), here, too.

Further Reading

For further reading, the below article by Williams (2017) shares lessons learned on diversity training, and Partners for Youth Empowerment share 5 facilitation game changers.

When the Trainer Got Trained Seven Things I Learned About Delivering Diversity Trainings.pdf
5_Facilitation_Game_Changers_Partners_for_Youth_Empowerment.pdf

Finalise your Schedule

Whilst your team is gathered and you're bonding into a cohesive team, now's the time to finalise your schedule.

Your team must know who is responsible at all times during your short course, and who is supporting any given activity, and keep in mind that your schedule may need to change during the short course. Again, as mentioned in the team roles document, there should be one person in charge of determining this, to avoid conflict. All team members hsould be aware that the schedule will likely change, and should be told who the person responsible is for making that decision, before the short course begins.

While trusting your team was spoken of in the Building a Team section, you need to also trust your participants. Setting strict rules for the participants is no fun, and quite counterproductive. You could implement a consensus process in which the participants set the ground rules, the community agreement, for the course and promise to abide by these. Keep this in mind whilst finalising your schedules.