3 Things We Can Learn from Teachers About Facilitation in the Workplace

8 min readMar 12, 2018

A look at tactics we can borrow from teaching to enhance our facilitation skills and get teams from 0 to 💯 in no time flat.

At Pivotal where I work, one of our core practices is facilitation; especially in Labs, we facilitate things a lot.

Late last year I presented a lightning talk where I looked at facilitation through the lens of the classroom. I imagine three questions may have popped up for you:

What does he actually know about teaching?
Why poke at facilitation?
Why teaching, of all things?

Good questions! Let’s address all of them first and then dive deeper.

What does he actually know about teaching?

I’ve worked in education in various forms during my career:

In teacher recruitment, where I learned a lot about educational practices
In a series of public sector consulting engagements, where I learned a lot about teacher evaluation
In product management & design, where I learned a lot about lesson planning & delivery

As a designer especially, beyond knowing about patterns, user behavior, and the like, it’s critical I know about facilitation.

Why look at facilitation?

Wikipedia defines facilitation as “any activity that makes an action or process easy or easier.” In the context of this article, designing and running successful meetings and workshops.

As I said before, at Pivotal we facilitate things a lot. And our designers, more than most, spend time honing their facilitation skills to ensure we can move our projects forward. I’m always looking for an edge when it comes to moving groups of people toward a shared goal—and taking action once we do.

Why teaching, of all things?

Here are some words used to describe great teachers:

Kind … Positive … Compassionate
Empathetic … A Builder … Inspirational

Empathy & kindness in particular are words we at Pivotal—and in the design and technology worlds at large—embrace heavily.

In addition, there is a HUGE body of knowledge in the education space. These are the top 20 education schools in the nation.

Image of logos for each of the top 20 education schools in the U.S. (ca. 2017)

They spend an enormous amount of time and resources researching topics like boosting motivation, dealing with stress, empathy & respect, cognitive psychology, growth mindsets, classroom design, computer science (fun fact: according to one 2016 study, 84% of parents believe CS is just as important as math, science, english), and more.

Long story short—there is a lot of overlap between facilitators and teachers, and as I reflected on this I realized something: A meeting or workshop is just a classroom for adults.

Hear me out. I think some of the classroom techniques that teachers use can be applied to meetings and workshops because:

People go to meetings to learn and share things
Someone is generally “in charge” of the meeting or workshop (i.e. whoever scheduled it)
Without solid preparation, even the best-intended meeting or workshop can go off the rails

When you think about it this way, it begs the question: what exactly can we learn from teaching?

1. How To Plan

Teachers are masterful planners—they know exactly what they’re going to do, when they’re going to do it, and what they’ll do if anything goes awry. It’s incredible, really.

How do they do it? Here are a few key ways:

Starting with learning goals & standards (e.g. “students will be able to create a representation for multiplying a fraction by another fraction”)
Scripting out the lesson
Anticipating challenges & working fallbacks into lesson (e.g. consider the potential pitfalls of each step so you can name them and show students why they’re incorrect)
Planning out instructional time (and checking it!)
Supporting particular students by scaffolding (e.g. “Students are given an exemplar or model of an assignment they will be asked to complete.”)

The diagram at left outlines three key questions that teachers ask themselves when planning a lesson:

What do I want my students to learn?
What teaching and learning activities will I use?
How will I check for understanding?

It’s important to note that these represent only the most basic reflection questions; there are many others that teachers ask themselves. I’ve pulled out a few that are particularly applicable to the planning required for our meetings and workshops to go smoothly:

What do I want them to understand and be able to do at the end of class?
If I ran out of time, which [concepts] could not be omitted?
And conversely, which [concepts] could I skip if pressed for time?
What are some commonly held ideas (or possibly misconceptions) about this topic that students might be familiar with or might espouse?
What will I do to explain the topic?
Going back to my list of learning objectives, what activity can I have students do to check whether each of those has been accomplished?

Put all together, teachers end up with something like the image below: a full lesson plan.

A sample lesson plan with aims, steps, modeling, practice, and assessment (via Achievement First)

You can see how this teacher has addressed the key questions and made a thorough plan that outlines where he wants to go and how he’ll get there.

How might we apply these tactics in the workplace?

Learning Goals

Identify and share out the goal of the meeting or workshop
Set a clear agenda and ensure people are aware of what it is

Anticipating Challenges

Pre-think ways in which you may not meet your meeting goals and have a “Plan B” for each

Scaffolding

Do one part of the activity together first then let people work individually
Remind people to speak loudly for the benefit of any attendees who are dialed-in by phone

2. How to Use Physical Space

Teachers are also masters of their domains and use every inch of their classrooms effectively. What does this look like in practice?

Organizing student and teacher materials to support the flow of the lesson (e.g. organizing the classroom library by reading level)
Using the room layout to create an environment for learning by placing furniture in a meaningful way (e.g. put students in rows for teacher-led activities; adjust to clusters for more collaborative work)
Placing visual supports on the walls as needed (e.g. written instructions on the whiteboard; agenda items with associated durations)

Take a look at this classroom and see if you can spot those tactics in action.

Image of an empty elementary school classroom prepped for class (via Wikimedia Commons)

Did you see:

Supplies labeled and waiting in a bookshelf?
Table clusters (great for collaboration!) readied with buckets of supplies & handouts?
Clear instructions written on the whiteboard that describe exactly what students should do now?
Many visual reminders posted around the room (e.g. calendar, classroom jobs, etc.)?

None of this was accidental! Each decision was made to support the goal of optimizing classroom time for learning and outcomes.

So how can we benefit from these ideas?

Materials

Make sure you have all the supplies you need in advance of your meeting or workshop
Is something missing? See if you can request it from your office management or IT departments as soon as you realize it — the earlier the better!

Room Layout

Book conference rooms early & often (but remember to give them up if you don’t need them anymore for some good room karma)
Ask yourself what sort of activity you’re planning to do — presentation, think-pair-share, small group — and set-up your space accordingly

Visual Supports

Write your agenda clearly on the whiteboard
Use the whiteboard to your advantage to make 2x2s, Venn diagrams, tables, etc. to support your activity
Make conversations visual by proactively writing highlights on the board

Awesome! We’ve planned and optimized our space, so now let’s see how teachers manage a classroom full of students.

3. How to Manage a Room

Good teachers know exactly what’s happening everywhere in their classrooms. They make this easy for themselves by taking deliberate action in preparation for (and during) a lesson.

A teacher seated with his class (via TeachHub)

Ensuring they’re pacing the lesson well (e.g. academic learning time > all other classroom time)
Rehearsing transitions & making them engaging (e.g. most disruptions occur before the bell rings and between activities. “Silent 30” is a signal for all students to clear their desks and sit silently within half a minute. Also, any transition energizers offered by GoNoodle)
Offering choice (e.g. “should this project be group or independent work?” Choice increases students’ buy-in.)
Keeping eyes facing their students

What can we learn from this?

Pacing

Assign activities in your agenda a time limit—and be realistic about it—because it’s impossible to do everything at once
ABWC: always be watching the clock

Transitions

Use kind redirection to move from topic to topic if the conversation drifts
To support this, set the tone at the beginning of the meeting so people know you’ll be redirecting as needed
Use breaks as transitions

Choice

If time wanes and much remains on your agenda, poll the group to determine what everyone feels is the top priority item to discuss

In Summary

The next time you run a meeting or workshop, think like a teacher!

Make a good plan by setting a clear goal & agenda, pre-thinking “Plan B”, and remembering your remote attendees
Make use of your space by ensuring you have all the supplies you need, booking rooms early & often, and using the whiteboard to your advantage
Manage the room by watching the clock, figuring out how you’ll get from here to there, and polling the group with activity options

And in the spirit of engaging transitions between this and your next article, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite GoNoodle videos: Banana Banana Meatball. Feel free to dance it out a bit if the spirit moves you!

Itching to go deeper into facilitation? I wrote an in-depth piece on the topic last year that includes some additional tips & tricks. Feel free to check it out!

How to Facilitate Like a Pro

Tips and tricks for turning meeting pain into meeting gain.

medium.com