Facilitation Skills

This two day course, which has a one week break between each day, is aimed at anyone who has to facilitate groups as part of their role and is for individuals who want to acquire or further develop their facilitation skills. There will be discussion and practise methods of facilitation in encouraging contributions from the various groups in varying situations.

This session will help those who:

• Managers who need to encourage contributions from teams
• Those who need to increase participation within a group
• Those who need to gather comments, feedback or ideas and thoughts from employee, community or service user groups.

Impact/outcomes

By the end of the training participants will:

• Developed a definition of facilitation and identified the skills and qualities required.
• Been introduced to models of giving and receiving effective feedback
• Tried at least three different group work techniques.
• Have participated in a skills practice session.
• Reviewed their own practice against the skills and qualities of a facilitator.
• Completed a personal action plan to transfer learning to the workplace and identify further develop needs.

Programme

What is facilitation? - Identifying the role of a facilitator, agreeing the objective of a facilitator in varying situations

Facilitating Groups - Identifying skills and qualities of a facilitator, Understanding group processes, Introducing techniques for working with groups

Effective facilitation - Recap day 1, Empowerment, involvement & control, Difficult situations and interventions

Skills Practice Session - Individual facilitations, Feedback & learning points

Reviewing the Learning and Preparing for the Future - Action plans & future development, and evaluation