Facilitation Guide

The Key to Facilitation

Facilitating a discussion is a complex and gratifying experience. While facilitating a discussion in a classroom, you have a lot of content knowledge, but you never know what perspectives and knowledge your students will bring to the discussion. The most important part of facilitation is to be open, to new perspectives, new ideas and new connections. It is important to become comfortable with the idea of not knowing where a discussion might go and allowing students to take on the discussion, with you as a guide and mirror.

Planning the Facilitation

The first part of facilitating a class discussion is to reiterate the ground rules that you have co-created with your class to ensure a productive discussion and exchange of ideas. While facilitating a discussion, there are a lot of different types of questions that you can ask students. The main kinds of questions that propel the discussion are:

Objective Questions: relating to specific facts or content

Reflective Questions: focused on personal reactions and emotions as related to the topic

Analytical Questions: allows participants to apply concepts to new situations

Relational Questions: finding patterns, links, and themes between ideas or topics

Cause and Effect Questions: exploring causal links between ideas, actions, and events. Includes looking at consequences and effects

Framing Questions

Some explicit examples of questions you might want to use are:

-What are some assumptions that you had going into this reading?

-How did this change the way you think about ________?

-How do you think _______ theorist would respond to this piece of evidence?

-What are some connections you see between _______ and _______

-What led you to feel that way?

-What was a significant point of conflict between _______ and _______?

-Do you see similarities between _______ and _______?

-What surprised you in the reading?

-What complicated your understand of _______?

-How did your reading of _______ make you rethink something you already knew?

-How does _______ reading complicate what we did last week?

It can be helpful to share with students what kind of question you are asking them, so they know in what ways you want them to think about the readings and the content of the course.

Keeping the Discussion Going

In addition to framing questions before the discussion, sometimes it is helpful to also have follow-up questions ready that are general and can be applied to various situations. Some forms of these follow-up or extension questions are:

Does anyone have a response to _______’s question/comment?
Do you, or anyone else, have a specific example of that from the reading this week?
Does anyone have anything to add to _______’s idea?
How do you think _______ theorist/school of thought would respond to _______’s question/idea?
Are there other things that surprised you in the readings?
Does anyone have a different perspective on that issue?