Skip to main content

Facilitative Skills for Collaborative Leaders

By

Facilitative Skills for Collaborative Leaders

Donna Ching, Ph.D.
September 22nd - 23rd, 2014

Facilitative Skills for Collaborative Leaders was two full days of exploring the philosophy, psychology and science of facilitation with Donna Ching.  We were given tools and templates to generate agendas, promote collaborative meetings, and organize the group’s memory.  We then practiced techniques for focusing group members on the tasks needed to develop the solutions they came together to find.  

We role-played to practice the language of an artful facilitator as we tried to “legitimize early and often” every person in the group.  This is the most important role of a facilitator.  Groups, especially ones not inclined to work together, need to have every person feel a part of the solution.  If someone doesn’t feel their voice is part of the solution there will mostly like not be a lasting one.

The two day training ended with a mock town meeting to resolve a real life situation.  We took on personas, and played our parts.  We also took turns as facilitator and group memory recorder.  It was very challenging, but entertaining and enlightening.   I had a few takeaways:  

  • Sometimes you have to act the part.
  • Trust the group to find the answer they need
  • Keep your on your Facilitator Hat and don’t lead the group with your knowledge
  • When recording, do just that and check with the speaker for accuracy
  • Collaborative decision making takes time. Be patient.

So lets bring it back home.  KSDL works collaboratively on most projects.  Good communication and skills such as Active Listening and knowing how to move a group from objectives to processes to results are fundamental to the way KSDL does business.  The skills provided during this training can help make anyone a more effective member or lead of a project.  It will undoubtedly also help as KSDL participates in collaborations with groups and organizations outside of Kemehameha Schools.  It is at these times effective facilitation and collaboration are needed.  They help us discover our common goals and reach them in a professional way encouraging these organizations to work with KSDL and and the greater KS community in the future.

I can easily recommend taking advantage of this or similar trainings about facilitation techniques.  At some point we all engage in collective brainstorming, planning and decision making.  It may be at work or it may be with your ‘ohana, but solving problems together is a pillar of pilina.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

By
This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event. When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future . Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts , there are online classes everywhere. The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge. **Note:  All icons link to the affiliated website.  Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list
Post a Comment
Read more

Geotagging

By
A "wouldn't it be nice" idea that's been around a while is the ability to tag a map with images that are linked to more information about the site. Kelly C suggested it as a way for students to share knowledge about a cultural/historic site or the geographic area they live in with classmates. (right, no addresses!) There are now cameras and even storage media that embed latitude and longitude into images as they are shot. But you don't need fancy new toys to do this. I tried Flickr's geotagging map and it's fun and supereasy. Want to try it? Log in to Flickr http://www.flickr.com Sign in as " techedine " password " wist101 " yea, corny. Click the " You " tab then the " Your Photostream > Map " or Organize > Your Map links. Click the Satellite link in the upper right. Cool view! (you may need Google Satellite downloaded). Images along the bottom of the screen with colored dots have already been droppe
6 comments
Read more

Zoho Creator

By
I thought I’d share this web application I came across in my quest to find a relatively simple app to help us manage our mentoring data in the DL Orientation. Our specific needs were that it be a free online database, password protected, had the capability of rapid form development without too much programming knowledge and was easy for the end user to use. The application that met these requirements was Zoho Creator ( http://www.zohocreator.com/ ) a part of a suite of online applications including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, wikis, organizers and more. What’s great about Zoho Creator is that they have an online repository of applications already developed that you can download to your account and use for free. Initially, I tried some of these applications, but it was overkill for our needs. Zoho Creator can do a lot if you know programming and they have a pay model where it allows you more flexibility and features. I think Zoho Creator would be a useful tool for both
6 comments
Read more