Last night ended the first year of my psychotherapist training program. I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned and noticed about facilitation through going through these classes.

The course was almost entirely auditory: 90% of the classes were discussion-based. For someone like me, who is predominantly an auditory learner, you’d think this would be a great system. However, just because you’re talking doesn’t mean you’re reaching the auditory learner. The auditory learner listens to what you’re saying, meaning that it needs to make sense. There needs to be main points. There needs to be verbal signals (“First we will talk about x, then y”, or “The point of this story is …” “To summarize the presentation …”). The auditory learner actually pays attention to the verbal flow and the words of the argument, and less attention to your gestures or to the colourful and descriptive phrases you’re using.

In some of our weekend workshops, we did more kinesthetic and visual activities. If you haven’t tried incorporating such activities into your own groups or workshops, I highly recommend it. You’ll get an entirely different take on a topic if, instead of asking for open discussion, you ask people to draw a response and then present it. You’ll gain an entirely different understanding of perspectives if you ask people to articulate their viewpoint through a gesture, body position, or sculpture.

People new to facilitation are often reluctant to deviate from the traditional discussion-based approach, fearing that pictures or movement won’t address their topic or will be uncomfortable for participants. I strongly believe that we are missing out on entire ways of knowing and ways of being if we don’t include such representations. Try it, and trust the process – you’ll be pleased and surprised with what unfolds.

When I first started work as a facilitator, one of the first sessions I designed and ran was on Peer Learning. I’m running it again this week for a non-profit group, and every time I return to it I’m reminded of the basics of facilitation, the basics of learning.

The session is designed for a beginner audience, and covers principles of adult learning (intent: adults learn best when they see the utility of what they’re learning vis-a-vis what they intend to do; participatory: adults learn best when they interact with new information, through experiential and participatory learning; building on previous knowledge: adults learn best when they can bring their own knowledge and experience to the table, and have it interact with what they’re learning; physiology: understanding that the more types of and numbers of interactions with information that the learners get, the stronger the connections built in their brains – especially as we get older and need more iterations to start transferring between short-term and long-term memory).

To support an understanding of how to create new and different interactions between learners and content, in this session we go over kinesthetic, auditory, and visual learner classifications, and then create presentations maximizing our use of cues designed for each of the learning styles.

After a review and debrief, each participant gets a copy of the Facilitator’s Guide I co-created a few years ago. I just heard this week that someone who has taken this session has since introduced the Facilitator’s Guide to their workplace (a major Canadian engineering company), and the facilitation skills are spreading.

For someone like me, who believes that our understanding each other’s ways of learning and interacting together is part of creating a better world, this is good news – and a reminder that going back to the basics of learning and facilitating can have a far-reaching impact.