Sometimes we just really want to “teach” something. Meaning, there is some critical piece of new information we really want to share. Since we don’t want to lecture our participants, we often look to a video or article to do the lecturing for us. Now, knowing that lecturing is antithetical to Transformative Facilitation, here are some thoughts on how to keep those articles and videos from becoming veiled lectures.

• Before you begin, prepare and share a list of questions you’d like participants to keep in mind as they watch the video or read the article. For example, I may ask:
  • What is something that surprises you as you read?
  • What do you notice about the children in the video?
  • Where do you see yourself in this piece?

• Similarly, you can run this “scavenger hunt” style, where participants are asked to look for specific pieces of information. The items for the hunt can either be closed, meaning, they have only one right response (as in the last question in the list below), or open, in that everyone in the room will come up with different answers:
  • Underline any points the author makes that you agree with.
  • Find three points in the video where you would do something differently.
  • What are the four main phases of the method?

• In both of the examples above, a guiding handout, with spaces for participants to write or take notes, is also helpful.

• Divide participants into small groups and have each group read and discuss a different paragraph of the article or watch a different video. Now have participants in each group count off 1, 2, 3, and then have all of the 1s get together, etc., so that you have new groups, each of which has one member from the original groups. Members now explain to each other the part of the article they read or video they watched, so that participants are retelling and explaining to each other what they watched/read, (this is commonly called a “jigsaw”).  

• Pause the video at intervals, or break the article up by circling/numbering paragraphs and hold short pair-share or small group discussions to allow participants to process information as you move through it, and once it’s finished. There are several types of prompting questions you can use for this:

• • Descriptive or basic comprehension questions: Questions that start with who, what, where, when and ask participants to clarify what they saw/read or summarize/retell. This is the type of question I would use in the jigsaw example above. The purpose here is to make sure everyone understands the basic content.
    • What did you see the teacher doing?
    • What did you hear throughout the video?
    • Who was the article about?

• • Application questions: These questions invite participants to apply what they just read/watched to something else, for example,
    • How is this similar to your experience?
    • How is this related to the topic we are covering today?
    • Why is this research important to your work?

• • Analysis questions: These questions ask participants to break out concepts or ideas found in the article/video, for example,
    • What are the key features of the system the author is describing?
    • What evidence does the video show for why the method works?
    • How does this compare to the article we read earlier today?

• • Synthesis questions: These ask participants to generate new ideas from what they just learned, for example,
    • How might you make changes in your practice based on what you learned from this article?
    • What other thoughts/questions does this video inspire in you?
    • What else would you add to this?

• • Evaluation questions: These questions ask participants to form judgements about what they read or heard, as in,
    • Did you agree with the author, why or why not?
    • Do you think the method in the video worked, how?
    • What did you appreciate about what the article was suggesting?

I’d love to hear other ideas you have for keeping things interactive while being informative! What kinds of activities do you do or questions do you ask?