Connections: the NSRF Journal

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Reflecting on Winter Meeting: A First-Time Facilitator’s Thoughts

by Andy Plemmons, Georgia

Invigorated. Exhausted. Recharged. Panic-stricken. Reflective. Brain dead. These are just a few of the words that could describe my state of mind as I facilitated at NSRF Winter Meeting for the first time. From the moment I was selected as a facilitator until my home group closing at the end of Winter Meeting, my mind raced to plan and piece together a responsive agenda for my home group.

The first question that I was faced with in planning for Winter Meeting was: How do you take a strand topic for a home group and plan an agenda that both pushes people’s thinking on the strand topic and honors the work that people will bring? All of the facilitators for my strand, “Facilitation, Collaboration, and Reflection,” discussed this question via phone and email and did not come to a concrete answer. As a first time facilitator, this was unsettling for me because I wanted an answer. We had come to an understanding that we would use whatever work people had to bring and during each protocol we would focus on facilitation during the debriefs. This understanding would later prove to offer its own challenges in my home group.

My strand also struggled with what texts to bring, knowing that we did not know the needs of our groups. Do we bring pieces that focus on how to facilitate, pieces that offer ways to improved facilitation, pieces that discuss problems with facilitation, or all or none of the above? The facilitators discussed several possible texts, but again came to no concrete answer. Each of us brought texts as resources and would pull these texts as needed into each of our home groups.

As Winter Meeting drew near, the strand facilitators began sharing ideas for agendas. Some facilitators had open agendas that would be filled-in once in Seattle, while other facilitators had a more systematic agenda planned out with the notion that changes would be made in response to the needs of the group. My own agenda changed daily, and as I got onto the plane to fly to Seattle, I could concentrate on nothing but my agenda and whether or not I had decided on the right activities for my group. I knew that I had done all that I could. I had talked with other facilitators, collaborated with my critical friend on the agenda and what her experiences had been in the past, emailed my home group members to begin to know them, requested that my home group members bring work, and even asked about the work that was being brought. At this point, I just wanted to get to Seattle and get started!

Arriving in Seattle, I was ready to meet face to face with the facilitators and nail down an agenda. However, when we met I once again saw how hard it is for a group of experienced facilitators to help one another develop one agenda. Everyone had so many ideas that I was more overwhelmed than when I was back home. Finally, I sat down with my critical friend, and we worked together to create an agenda that we thought would meet the needs of our group for the first day, leaving time open for participant work. There came a point during the night where I finally had to tell myself that this was going to be okay. I had to realize that I had done my best to be responsive to the strand topic and that I needed to wait to meet my group before I could truly be responsive to their needs. I tried to relax and wait on the first day of the meeting to come.

I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for how exhausting the first day would be. My critical friend and I knew what we needed to accomplish during the morning session with our home group. We began establishing our community through introductions and a microlab focused on facilitation. Then, we set norms and looked at an NSRF text using a text rendering. Our conversations were going great, but what was not going great was the management of time. Time was slipping away and before we knew it we were almost to lunch and had not talked about reflection or collected the work that participants had brought. Without these pieces in place, our afternoon agenda would not pull together. At this point, I had to start making impulsive decisions without having time to reflect on what the outcome might be, and this became a source of frustration to me. I went from wanting to take time to really explore the work that was brought through some reflective writing and a gallery walk to just having the participants write down on an index card what they brought and what they hoped to gain from it. I knew that this decision was the right one to make considering the time that I had to work with, but it was not as meaningful as I wanted to make it.

One aspect of the morning that the participants and I were excited about was our tool for reflection. We used a seed chart to record our learning throughout Winter Meeting. This three-column chart allowed us to think about the ideas that we were experiencing during the meeting and sort them into three categories: seeds, sprouts, and plants. The seeds were the ideas that were freshly sown into our minds. Sprouts were ideas that we were starting to understand and were beginning to take root in our minds. The plant ideas were thoughts that we were beginning to fully understand enough to take back with us to explore at our schools. This reflection tool was one that Thomas Van Soelen and I had developed at a coaches institute, and I was glad to offer it as a way for us to think about our learning during the meeting. It was a tool that we revisited often and used as a way to open each day with a go round.

The most exhausting hour of the first day for me was lunch. As I gobbled down my roast beef sandwich, my critical friend began sorting the index cards filled with work on the table. We began mapping out who would present in the afternoon and on the following days. We also noted who we needed to get more information from in order to understand their work. With some sense of order about our afternoon set, we hurried back to our home group space to begin setting up and having conversations with participants about their work, who would present, and who would facilitate. Our planning and conversations led right up to the start of the second half of our day.

With a huge breath of air, I began our second session. The afternoon provided an opportunity to look at our common text from Linda Christensen and to have conversations about equity using the Four “A”s text protocol. We followed these conversations by looking at work brought by the participants and reflecting on our seed charts.
When the day came to a close, I felt such a sense of relief and accomplishment. I sat down with my critical friend and began to talk about how much we had achieved. Our community was being established. We had experienced protocols that were new to many participants. Reflection was being done throughout the day using seed charts, and participants were having opportunities to facilitate and collaborate. As we read the day’s reflections, our conversations about our home group’s accomplishments were confirmed, but two things began to stand out to us to respond to on the second day. Equity and Facilitation.

Some people in our home group felt unsure about how equity was supposed to fit into our strand of Winter Meeting. It was addressed by some participants that it almost felt as if we talked about facilitation, then switched to talking about equity, and then switched back to talking about facilitation. I began to wonder how equity could become a part of our conversation instead of feeling like a separate piece. Should we have addressed this by focusing on participant work that involved an issue of equity? My mind drifted back to our planning sessions and the decision we had made to encourage any type of work that participants needed to bring. Had this been the right decision? I also thought about the range of experiences that each home group had. Our home groups had participants who had been involved in CFGs for 10 years and people who were just beginning to understand what a CFG is. The experiences and understandings of equity were just as diverse. My critical friend and I began to realize the difficulty of being responsive to both equity and facilitation. In the end, we decided that we would make every effort as facilitators to include equity in our conversations, but facilitation would be our main focus on day two.

Participants responded in the day one reflections that they wanted to talk more about facilitation. I set up our second day’s protocols with the importance of wearing two different hats throughout the protocols. We had to be participants who were supportive of the presenters’ needs, but we also had to be vigilant of the facilitative moves that were taking place. Why did the facilitator choose to say that at that time? What word choices was the facilitator making? What other facilitative moves could have been made? During each debrief, we spent time debriefing the protocol, but we spent a longer period of time discussing facilitation.
We also spent a period of time focusing on facilitation nightmares. After reflecting on a time when facilitation went all wrong, we each took time to read a nightmare aloud and the group talked about possibilities for facilitators to address those uneasy times if they were to occur again.

One of the protocols we used on day two was a consultancy to address a dilemma around how to support CFGs of coaches who are coaching groups of teachers with varying experience levels. My critical friend and I decided to use this protocol with the whole home group because the dilemma had connections to many of the questions that participants were asking about facilitation. The debrief of this protocol was the best one of our whole home group time, and my hunch is that it is because the work that was brought was truly connected to the facilitation strand. This brought my thinking once again to the idea that we may have needed to focus the type of work that participants brought to be around the strand topics. Focusing the work would have helped the facilitators to be responsive to the reasons why each participant chose the strand that they did.

Sitting down to read the second day reflections helped me to see the importance of having a group write reflections. I saw that the decisions that my critical friend and I made based on the day one reflections really responded to what the group was asking for. Participants were gaining a deeper understanding of what it meant to facilitate, collaborate, and reflect.

On the final day, we closed with a three-wall chalk talk around our strand topics. Each wall had a different word: facilitation, reflection, and collaboration. Instead of doing a traditional chalk talk, I chose to structure what participants wrote. Using the prompt “I used to think…but now I think…”, each participant responded to each word of our strand. We closed our time together by doing a go round and committing to an action that we would each take as we went back to our schools.

As I sit now and think back on the whole experience of facilitating at Winter Meeting, a quote from that final chalk talk stands out to me. “I used to think facilitation was hard. Now I think it’s HARD!…to do it well and respond to the needs of the group.” That quote could sum up this whole thought process I’ve had as I think about my first time facilitating. I learned so much about listening to individual needs, collaborating with people of diverse backgrounds, reflecting and documenting the experiences and learning of a group, and looking ahead to the actions that need to take place. I’m so glad that I stepped up to this experience instead of staying in my comfort zone of just being a Winter Meeting participant. I know that if I choose to facilitate at Winter Meeting again, I will experience some of these same struggles, but I know that my worries and struggles are part of the process of becoming a responsive facilitator.

Andy Plemmons may be contacted at aplemmons@charter.net