Where can I find good strategies for leading small group workshops?

August 13, 2015 2:22 PM

Where can I find resources that describe innovative, interesting, and effective approaches to facilitating brief and/or small group workshops? An example (for a larger group) would be fishbowl conversations: an engaging, creative break from the "I talk, you guys discuss" model of conveying information. Bonus points for things that give both facilitator and participants an active role to play.

I'm planning a half-hour workshop as part of a job interview, so I want to have a good, informative workshop and also demonstrate a lot of my competencies in teaching, facilitation, presence, etc. I'm hoping to find a list of resources (maybe a website or a blog?) for creative teaching and facilitation techniques that I might want to incorporate/adapt into this workshop. I've successfully facilitated larger groups in the past, but here I'm dealing with less than 6 people and I'm seeking new perspectives on how to make this great.

So far, my searching is mostly finding treatises on the advantages and disadvantages of small group work in academia, which isn't quite what I'm looking for. Do you have any suggestions of techniques or of ways to find techniques? I'm seeking inspiration.

posted by c'mon sea legs to Education (3 answers total)

There's a book called Gamestorming that is my absolute #1 go-to for this kind of thing. It's relatively new, and is by Dave Gray. It's full of games like "Stop, Start, Continue" and while many of them are similar to one another, it's organized by the kind of ideation you're doing.

It's a Rosenfeld Media book, and you can probably get the e-book from their website right now. I seriously cannot recommend it enough.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:25 PM on August 13, 2015

The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation is a great source of resources, though they are all about the public engagement / using dialogue to solve social issues side of things, which may not be the angle you're interested in. Here's a great list of "participatory practices" from them.

I hear The Skilled Facilitator by Roger Schwartz get recommended a lot. Here's a pdf of a chapter.

More:
Guide from Seeds for Change with some good ideas.
Here's a free e-book from some group I don't know anything about.
Another collection of facilitation techniques

(Also, this is tangential but in the future if you want to keep building your skills with this stuff, Andy Sachs at the Dispute Settlement Center of Orange Country does really good trainings on facilitation.)
posted by aka burlap at 8:21 PM on August 13, 2015

Thanks so much! I ended up using some of these for inspiration and did an empathy mapping exercise... and go the job!
posted by c'mon sea legs at 1:50 PM on August 30, 2015