Facilitation Tips

Many people new to TBL worry about facilitating the discussion after simultaneous reporting. Although we all have much to learn about facilitation, the good news is the 4S structure of TBL activities lead discussions that are simpler to facilitate than open general discussions.

When teams commit to their positions and publically report it, the instructor can then facilitate the report by simply going team to team asking “why did your team pick A” going to another team “why did you pick B”. You work the room going side to side and making sure to engage all parts of the room. Try to resist talking to teams next to you. This can become a conversation between the instructor and one team and not a conversation between all teams. One trick is to ask teams across the room to add their two cents. This helps the reporting conversation stay between students and not between instructor and one team of students. You can ask a team to tell you about their team’s deliberations – what did they talk about, how did you decide…What is nice about this is you are only asking them to recount the conversation, not what is the right answer.

When discussion energy begins to wane you can begin to ask “why didn’t you pick…” or “was there a second choice that your team considered?”…”why do you think someone might pick that choice?” These are the same kinds of questions that you need to use to play devil’s advocate if all the teams agree.

Another important consideration is to close the discussion well. You want to make sure students get reminded of the important take-aways, the assumptions examined, and the inferences that needed to be made. You can summarize or even better have the students paraphrase a summary of the discussion. Reflective one minute paper can be used to great effect here. You can simply ask students to quickly individually list the “3 most important points” or “2 remaining concerns” or “a context where it might not be applicable.” A nice finish to this activity is to have teams compile these points into a team consensus worksheet. However you do it, not closing activities well robs them of some of their value.

For more on these strategies, check out my and Loretta Whitehornes facilitation poster from the 2012 TBL conference.