This month, the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS) welcomed Paul White, the Associate Dean Education at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at their departmental welcome for new teaching associates. Paul ran a fantastic session on workshop facilitation and active learning for our colleagues at EBS, and we hope you will enjoy reading about some of the highlights from this session.
Paul and a group of participants
Whether you are a seasoned educator, or new to teaching, facilitating a workshop effectively can be a challenging task. The active dynamic and demanding nature of a workshop may mean that the facilitator needs to acquire many skill sets to engage and guide students. Throughout the training session at EBS, the whole group had a great dialogue and took home great insights into effective practices. We saw small and large-group discussion, mini role-play activity and many opportunities for colleagues to reflect.
Role-play activity to re-enact different student behaviours
Key takeaways
Here are a few key takeaways on how to effectively run workshops. We hope this can be your food-for-thought:
1. Establish a culture of effective learning
As the facilitator, you have the opportunity to lead by example. By modelling being well prepared, you will have a great chance of establishing a good culture of effective learning among your students. Planning and preparation is the key to facilitating a workshop effectively, and it is also the key to successfully participating in and contributing to a workshop.
Depending on your disciplines, the facilitator may have the ‘right’ answers to questions most of the time. However, such questions often address the lower order thinking skills such as recalling information, understanding basic concepts or applying concepts to simple examples. On the other hand, the Socratic method of asking thoughtful guiding questions to stimulate discussion among students, without giving them one absolute answer, is the best way to help students develop higher order thinking skills such as evaluating and critical thinking.
3. Know the key characteristics of an effective facilitator
Exercising good body language, patience and empathy, and showing enthusiasm from the facilitator, just to name a few, are great characteristics that a facilitator could have. How do you achieve these? Unsurprisingly, practice makes progress.
Involving all participants. Try ‘tracking your heat-map’, i.e. how you move around in the room and address each group of participants. It is also advisable to keep some distance and not to be too intimidating to students.
Communicating with a personal touch. For example, a great idea a participant shared was to get in touch with students prior to the semester and connect with them personally during the first session. This got students to keep coming to the following sessions. It is also good to get to know students on a first name/ preferred name basis.
4. Build and maintain a positive students’ perception of you
A facilitator’s energy can be contagious, and students can be influenced by how you carry yourself throughout your workshop. Enthusiasm and attentiveness can help facilitators go a long way in making and keeping a good impression to students.
5. Gather feedback from students
No teacher is perfect, and there is always room for improvement and enhancement in your facilitation practice. Gathering quick formative feedback from students, whether by verbal or written mean, may help you uncover great potential for your practice.
A closing thought
Throughout the session, our colleagues at EBS were very enthusiastic in sharing about their own teaching and facilitating experiences, and it was rewarding to hear the buzz from many great conversations about the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in running a workshop. We look forward to having more inter-faculty collaborations like this, in which we share knowledge, learn from each other and feel inspired to try new things.
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