Drill down to the core values of your facilitation work.
As an educator and leader, you’ve likely participated in a broad spectrum of projects, events, and activities calling for different kinds of facilitation.
You may have
- Run a professional development workshop for your peers.
- Taught a class for your community.
- Coordinated an online project.
- Organized a local event.
Each kind of facilitation asks you to do something different. For example. for example, you might teach a class or facilitate an event or workshop in-person, while delivering an online class our course asks you to work at a distance from your participants.
Despite their differences, these kinds of facilitation have a lot in common. In every case, your teammates, community members, and learners depend on you to anticipate and plan for their needs.
Your job as a facilitator, regardless of scale, is to help others do their best work and find fulfillment from it.
How do you do that in the moment while you’re teaching? At that teaching-and-learning level of granularity, what does it look like to facilitate in a needs-fulfilling way? How do you bring people together - the curious and the fearful - during a series of shared moments that build agency and relevance into learning?
It’s tempting to say, “Who knows?” It’s more accurate and helpful to say there are lots of ways to do it - and that there are lots of things from failures and successes alike. We’re going to imagine and develop some of those ways together.
Communication, iteration, preparation: every kind of facilitation depends on factors like these.
In this module, we’ll look at how big ideas like those manifest themselves as little steps in the moment of facilitating teaching and learning in community.
Our job is to make facilitation a design process that draws on intentionality, structured improvisation, and testing and iteration to equip others with the confidence and competencies they need to succeed in their work. We help people discover the external and internal resources they need to achieve their dreams and reach their goals,
It may feel weird to talk about such an intensely interpersonal thing as teaching in structured ways, but remember: we’re developing best practices for facilitation, not lock-step instructions for paint-by-the-numbers activities. We are developing habits of mind and body, as well teaching and learning materials that speak humanely to our learners. The attention we pay and care we take in developing our skills so will allow us the greatest possible flexibility in helping others develop their own talents.
We want to become expert at anticipating, planning for, and responding to an ever-shifting context of needs in a learning space. That asks a lot of us. The structures we build and habits we practice will be - at once - a constant support and a framework for constant improvement and change.
At Mozilla, we value openness and innovation, especially on the web. We value those things in service to people around the world who deserve online privacy, better web literacy education, safe, digitally inclusive communities, and opportunities to use a decentralized, democratic web to innovate solutions to the problems they face in their daily lives, online and off.
At its core, being open is about structuring any project or organization, technical or not, to invite the widest possible diversity of contributors to participate in the work, adapt or remix it according to their needs, and get value from it.
Open Leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. Open leaders empower others to become leaders within open projects and communities.
When we say we value “openness” or practice "open leadership," we mean that we value being transparent in our mission and the work we do to carry it out. As we strive to keep the web an open resource, accessible to all, we want to document and share our work to
- Make it available for others to use, adapt or remix, and improve.
- Inspire others to take similar actions to champion the open web.
- Hold ourselves accountable to a global public by sharing what we say, as well as what we do.
Of course, our values overlap with our partners’ values. Our stewardship of the open web brings us into alliances with individuals and organizations around the world. We don’t all have the same exact values; we don’t all do the same exact work. However, we stand together on common ground.
Before continuing in this module, take a moment to reflect on
- The values you share with Mozilla.
- The values you bring to this work from your own experience and from your community’s needs.
Complete this vision statement and keep it handy as we work through the rest of the curriculum together.
Also before we go on, let’s bring to mind and document the hallmarks of excellent, needs-fulfilling facilitation.
Think back to three of the best events, projects, or workshops you attended as a facilitator or participant.
Try to pick one big example (like a large gathering or long-term project), one medium example (like a smaller gathering or workshop that lasted for several sessions), and one small example (like a single class, a one-day hackathon or conference session).
Regardless of whether or not you led part of that work, look back at each example as a facilitator.
What made each event work so well? From what you know or what you can tell as an observer, how did each example fulfill its participants’ needs? What made each example so delightful, relevant, or useful to its people?
Use this organizer to list what made each example of facilitation succeed and then to draw some general conclusions about they all have in common. Figuring out how to apply those common features to small moments of teaching learning will be the crux of our work together in this module.
Keep this list nearby, alongside your values, as we move through the curriculum.