Be intentional, but imaginative, in your design
Design is a very intentional process, but it requires a lot of imagination and flexibility from start to finish.
To bring your creativity to bear on a design problem, you need to define it first. What do you have to teach? How much time do you have? What kinds of resources are available to you and your learners?
If you can answer questions like those before you begin, you’ll be able to create a solid foundation of constraints (or limits) to use during planning. Your constraints will become something to stand on and launch from, rather than something holding you back.
Here’s another way to think of it: by defining the problem and listing your constraints, you’re creating a puzzle with multiple solutions for yourself to solve through planning and facilitation.
Before you begin planning a class, session, or workshop you’re facilitating, define the problem you’re trying to solve first. Find the answers to questions like these:
- What are you going to teach or facilitate?
- Who are you going to teach? What do you need to learn about the topic?
- Will you work alone or on a team?
- If you work on a team, what capacities does each teammate bring to the project?
- Where are you teaching? What does the space look like? Can you change it around? Is part of it outdoors?
- How much time do you have to plan?
- How much time do you have during the event?
- What resources are available to you and your learners?
- What other responsibilities do you have around the event and how to they impact this part?
Answering these questions will help you make the best use of your planning time. You’ll know the dimensions of your work so you can treat it like a container to fill with the activities and experiences you design to meet your learners’ needs.
Once you’ve defined your problem, it’s time to think of what your learners’ needs. What do they need from you in order to be successful with what you’re teaching?
As you gain more and more experience as a facilitator and with specific audiences, you’ll naturally begin to plan with their needs in mind. However, as you begin your facilitation practice or get ready to work with a new audience, it’s important to reach out and ask about specific needs they have as learners.
For example, an audience of experienced web users might appreciate more challenging activities than an audience of novices would. An audience of working-age adults looking for career development might ask for something different from an audience of younger learners for whom skills-training isn’t as relevant.
You should aim to practice needs-fulfilling facilitation that satisfies each audience’s hunger for authenticity, delight, and relevancy. If you fail at achieving those things, at least you have pursued them. Your audience will recognize that and, as a result, be much more like to try the work and offer your constructive, even enthusiastic feedback about how to improve it instead of feeling like they can’t do it, like they don’t get it, or, worst of all, like you don’t care about their success.
There’s a lot to unpack here - we’ll get to more of it in later sections and activities - but let’s be clear: if you facilitate for yourself instead of your learners, you’ll fail. That failure can lead to outcomes we should design against, namely, feelings of blame, confusion, fear, and mistrust between you and your learners.
You are responsible for teaching to your learners’ needs. If you begin with a needs-fulfilling end in mind, and if you assume this responsibility throughout the design process, you will
- Teach more successfully.
- Fail productively and be able to model that kind of failure for your learners.
- Get helpful feedback offered in good faith about improving your work.
- Have more opportunities to network and practice your craft.
- Let go of what’s not working and iterate more quickly - and at an increasingly smaller, more immediate scale - over time.
Take the time to research your audience and its needs before each event. Create and deliver a pre-survey using something like Google Forms early in the design process of each project you do, and analyze the results you get to tailor your plans for your learners.
Here’s an example of a pre-survey we use for Web Literacy trainings.
[INSERT PRE-SURVEY]
You don’t necessarily need to collect names, either, to get an idea of what the group and individuals might need from you.
Not every answer or dataset will be perfectly accurate. For example, people often think they’re web literacy skills are higher than they are, which is understandable - being good with technology doesn’t always mean you understand how the web works, but how would you know that without learning more about the web first?
Regardless, using a survey like this one lets you
- Get a feel for how experienced your audience is with your topic.
- Better understand your learners’ questions a fears.
- Finish defining your problem with the human elements your design has to address.
Make it a habit to ask your learners what they need from you while you’re designing facilitation. Constraining yourself to meet their needs will help you deliver engaging and effective teaching and learning.
Review the questions from the beginning of this section:
- What are you going to teach or facilitate?
- Who are you going to teach? What do you need to learn about the topic?
- Will you work alone or on a team?
- If you work on a team, what capacities does each teammate bring to the project?
- Where are you teaching? What does the space look like? Can you change it around? Is part of it outdoors?
- How much time do you have to plan?
- How much time do you have during the event?
- What resources are available to you and your learners?
- What other responsibilities do you have around the event and how to they impact this part?
Think back to an event you recently facilitated or think ahead to your next event.
How would you answer these questions? What questions would you add? How would you use your answers to write a problem statement that could guide your design?
Use this template to write a problem statement capturing the challenges you faced in designing your last event or the challenges you face in designing your next one. Bookmark your responses so you have a model of how to define your design problems for future facilitation projects.
What would you like know about an audience before you show up to work with them?
While some specific questions might change from audience to audience, what, in general, would be most helpful to know going into your design process? What information would help you plan for better teaching and learning with a group?
Brainstorm a list of questions you’d like to ask a potential audience, pick the ones that seem essential to designing facilitation that meets its needs, and then save that list of questions somewhere you can get to it whenever you need it. Copy and paste those questions into a new survey using a tool like Google Forms or Survey Monkey to create your first instance of the survey. Bookmark the link and come back to the survey when you’re ready to revise and share it with your next audience.
Remember, this is a pre-survey! Send it at the beginning of your planning process to give yourself the best chance of designing a needs-fulfilling experience for your learners.