Capture your thoughts & build prototypes from those most likely to succeed.
Defining your design problem and identifying your learners’ needs are important parts of your facilitation strategy. They establish the ground rules for your work and set a vision for its success. You know what you have to do. Next you have figure out how to do it.
Brainstorming and prototyping are the processes you can use before an event to find the tactics most likely to deliver on your strategy and vision.
When you brainstorm - or braindump or brainpuke (whatever you want to call it) - you try to come up with as many ideas as possible without undue regard for their feasibility. You’ll make decisions later about filtering and refining the list. To begin, just capture every thought you can; you never know which ones might surprise you or which ones you might be able to combine into an activity, idea, or project worth more than the sum of its parts.
Use a shared document such as a Google Doc or Etherpad so you can share your thinking easily. You may be working collaboratively with other facilitators on such a document in real-time, or you may want to share your thinking with a critical friend for feedback, or you may want to reference the document while writing a reflective blog post on process. It’s easier to set yourself up to share your work from the start than it is to go back through a project copying and pasting or changing settings later to make the work more accessible.
For an in-depth learning experience about working open in this way, visit the Open Leadership Training Series, also from Mozilla.
A note about brainstorming with a team: if you’re planning with other facilitators, make sure you each have the opportunity to brainstorm independently before sharing your thinking with the group.
Brainstorming all together, all at once, and all out loud advantages the people who dominate the conversations they join. By asking everyone to brainstorm silently and independently for a few minutes before sharing, you make sure everyone has the opportunity to compose and frame their thoughts without the social pressure of finding a way into a more spontaneous and less moderated conversation that could be fraught with power imbalances.
Indeed, to make sure you hear every voice on your brainstorming team, you should combine independent brainstorming time with group norms and a protocol for sharing your ideas.
Group norms are social agreements shared by everyone on your team. For example, “Don’t put others down,” might be a group norm that’s relatively easy to agree on, but might take some practice to follow in real-life as interrupters learn to stop interrupting or cynics learn to stop listing blockers without also offering solutions.
As part of your facilitation practice, you can use a game like Cards Against Community from the Coral Project to help teammates understand and avoid conversational roles that harm other group members, as well as the group’s work.
Whether you’re planning with a new group for just one project or working with a facilitation team over time, it’s worth it to craft a list of group norms that make your work space safe for everyone’s ideas and give you a constructive way to resolve conflicts between ideas.
Group norms might sometimes also be characterized as a code of conduct or set of participation guidelines.
With group norms in place, it becomes easier to share your idea after brainstorming. However, to ensure you hear from everyone, it’s best to use a protocol for sharing, as well.
For example, you might follow a process like this in a face-to-face (F2F) brainstorming session:
- Pick someone a volunteer or pick someone at random to share an idea, so long as that person is comfortable sharing first.
- Ask the other group members to raise their hands if they had a similar idea.
- Ask the entire group not to repeat that idea.
- As the group members to raise their hands again if they still have a different idea to share.
- Ask the next person to share a new idea.
- Repeat the process until each idea is shared.
Be sure to capture all the ideas in your notes, however you take them.
If you’re working virtually on a shared document, set aside some “silent ether-padding” or “silent Google docs” time for people to type in their ideas without comment.
Whether you’re working F2F or online, you need to reach consensus on which ideas to prototype next.
To find out which ideas resonate most with your teammates (or yourself) and to see which ideas most clearly address your problem statement and learners’ needs, you can invite your teammates to put a sticker next to the ideas they think will work best or to type “+1” next to ideas on a shared document. People can also post clarifying questions with sticky notes or type them into your doc.
The goal is to pick the ideas most like to succeed within the bounds of your constraints and then to prototype, or build a rough draft, of each one. Once you have your prototypes, you can share them for feedback ahead of your event and keep revising them to serve your learners the best they can in the moment of the event.
Finally, as the brainstorming moderator, you can lead a discussion of the questions and then point out the ideas that seem to have the most “heat” - the most +1s or the most interest in them - before bringing your group to consensus on which ideas to prototype next.
Now it’s time to compose rough drafts of the activities you’d like to run. Build the resources and gather the materials you need for each activity as you go so that when it comes time to test, your critical friends and collaborators can experience the activity as it’s meant to be. For example, if an activity calls for sticky notes or a web comic template, have those items ready for your testers to use so they can focus on the content and learning in your lesson, rather than get stuck on what’s missing.
Likewise, use a consistent template and consider sharing the prototypes to maximize opportunities for testing and feedback ahead of your event. Try to share your work somewhere it’s easily accessible. That way, when you ask someone for feedback, you make it easy for them to find the document, comment on it, and help you improve your work.
You can see an example of Mozilla curriculum template here. It includes sections like these:
- Title.
- Author’s name.
- Duration.
- Summary.
- Skills and standards.
- Learning objectives.
- Audience.
- Materials.
- Steps.
By structuring your prototypes consistently, you save time. You and your respondents can spend more time discussing and improving content than working on organization.
Finally, as you prototype, consider pairing offline and online “steps” in each lesson that complement one another and teach towards the same idea. That way your work can be more easily adapted in lo-fi and no-fi settings (places with little or no access to the internet, respectively), it offers multiple pathways for learning, and you can use the offline portion as a backup plan if technology fails you during an event.
Start a Google Doc or Etherpad for brainstorming your ideas about activities you might use at your next event. Name the document clearly and bookmark it so you can find it again. Link from that shared document to your problem statement and any analysis you’ve done of your learners’ needs.
Either on your own or with your team (using participation guidelines like those suggested above), brainstorm as expansive a list as possible of needs-fulfilling solutions to your facilitation design problem.
After the brainstorm ends, indicate which ideas you and any collaborators think are most likely to succeed. Ask and answer any clarifying questions you have.
Make a “final” list of the activities to prototype and then get to work building them.
Build out rough drafts of each activity that made it past the brainstorming stage.
If it helps you get started, you can remix the Mozilla curriculum template in Thimble, Mozilla’s online code editor, or copy or fork a Google Docs version or GitHub version of the same template.
Gather these prototypes in a project folder on your computer, in a project folder on a shared platform like Google Docs or even GitHub, or in your browser as a set of bookmarks if you’re using something like Etherpad. Have them ready to share, use, and revise. In addition to all the suggestions you get from your test audience, you’ll get plenty of real-time feedback from your learners in just a bit.