Personalizing Your Facilitation

Another aspect of getting the learning off to a good start is personalizing the course and materials so that they reflect your expertise and style as a facilitator. The more the materials fit you, and the more comfortable you are, the more conducive the climate is to learning. Personalization allows you to capitalize on your own talents.

Your Materials

One aspect of personalization is simply reviewing the materials and knowing what comes first, next, and so on. Identify the content that you think is most critical and plan how you will emphasize it. Identify the content areas that you want to expand on when you get to that part. Think about and prepare for the most likely learner questions and comments.

Examples and Stories

Prepare examples and war stories from your own experiences that will illustrate content points. Practice your telling of these items so that you are prepared to emphasize the points that are most illustrative. You can even leave out part of it and then tell the rest of the story later, or you can ask the group, “What do you think happened next?”

Winging it with examples and stories doesn’t work. You can get off schedule in a big way. If you select a story or example to tell on the spot, you might be stealing your thunder for a later content point. You might get to the end and discover that the main point isn’t really relevant to the content at hand. Some facilitators even get to the end of a spur-of-the-moment story and realize that not only does it not make a point, but also that the punch line is offensive. Think through your telling of examples and stories.

Basic Rule 18

Don’t wing it when it comes to your stories and examples. Plan ahead: Make sure the stories and examples are in alignment with the learning objectives, and rehearse them so that they flow smoothly.

Humor

Speaking of punch lines, humor in general must be addressed. Appropriate jokes and funny stories can be very effective in making a point and in establishing a comfortable climate. Following are tips for using humor, jokes, and funny stories:

• The humorous item must be relevant to the learning and content at hand. Telling a story or joke just for fun takes the learning off track.

• Practice telling it so you know what to emphasize or exaggerate, and so you don’t forget the punch line.

• Make sure your joke or story is clean. Perhaps this cautionary note seems obvious, but for some facilitators, it isn’t. Using even mild curse words is offensive to some learners, and it makes you look unprofessional. And, don’t make the mistake of thinking that, if your audience swears, you can too. Part of your role is to model professional behavior.

The other caveat that should be obvious is don’t use jokes or stories that stereotype racial groups, age groups, ethnic groups, the sexes, or other characteristics of people that are not related to the learning experience. And, that includes your own group, whatever it may be! It’s not OK to make jokes about your own ethnicity, age,

Basic Rule 19

With humor, when in doubt—don’t.

sex, or whatever because not all folks who are like you will agree with you. And, joking about one’s own group doesn’t give license to joke about other groups!

Use humor to be inclusive, not exclusive. All the learners might not get the joke if you make a humorous reference to a current event or a current movie, for example. Be prepared to explain it, or don’t use the reference at all. One of the worst things that a facilitator can do is exclude some of the learners from the process.

One last point about stories and humor: If telling jokes and stories isn’t your long suit, it’s perfectly OK not to do it. There are other personalization methods that might work better for you. Some people are simply not good storytellers: They are too fast or too slow, or they forget the punch line!

Take advantage of your own uniqueness. After all, the word personalize means that you can do something that comes from your own talents to enhance the learning. Are you a juggler, an amateur magician, a poet, a songwriter, or an artist? The potential list goes on and on of talents that you can use to make learning points. Here’s an example: A facilitator was a professional rock musician in a former life. In a course about teamwork, he divided his class into small groups and gave them all percussion instruments (triangles, maracas, finger cymbals, and so forth). He taught each small group a specific rhythm with their instruments and allowed them to practice. Then, he had one group begin with their rhythm and had each group add their rhythms one by one until the whole room was rocking with an orchestrated percussion beat. What better way to make learning points about teamwork and synergy?

Basic Rule 20

Use your unique talents and skills to personalize and enhance learning