Design Station

Design is the placement of learning activities and exercises in a sequence to maximize impact.

Scenario: Your group has been approached by a group of activists organizing against local school closings. They are seeking a speak out training and have asked you to design something. The group is made of 25 people and a mix of teachers, students, and parents. The training is for 2 hours.

Activity: Design an agenda for the training. The goals of the training are first, to prepare participants to tell their stories in front of large groups  and second, give participants a chance to practice responding to media/government officials, especially hostile ones.

Things to consider: Make sure your agenda takes into consideration different learning styles, the experiential learning cycle (experience, reflection, generalization, application), different backgrounds of the participants. 

Use as many tools from the tool grab bag as you’d like. Leave your finished agenda at the station.

Building the Container Station

Building the container is important because the stronger the container is, the more participants are able learn.

Scenario: Your group is planning the first of a series of racial justice workshops for a multiracial group that works together.

Activity: Draw your ideal space for this workshop then share with the group.

Things to consider: How should the space be set up to ensure full participation from all attendees? Consider issues of equal participation and safe space.  What considerations would you put into the space, the design, the atmosphere?  Remember you aren’t writing the agenda here, but illustrating a container that supports everyone’s participation and learning.

Leave finished drawings at the station.

Dealing with Conflict/Difficult Behavior Station

Scenario: You are facilitating a direct action planning meeting against the building of a detention facility in your community.

Activity: This will be a role play activity with tap-in option. Choose one person to start the role play as a facilitator. The other group members will act out various behaviors: veering off the agenda; saying something offensive; having side conversations; having conflict with another group member.  The facilitator practices interventions, and at any time during the role play group members can switch roles, tapping into or out of the facilitator role to try different approaches.

Things to consider: The facilitator should practice dealing with these behaviors while the stationed note taker writes down the different intervention tools used. At the end the different tools noted  will be shared and discussed with entire group.

Leave list of intervention tools at the station.

Debrief Station

Debriefing is an opportunity to move a group from an experience through the rest of the experiential cycle: reflection, generalization, and application. When participants reflect on their experience, they identify what happened for them. When they generalize, they ask what it meant and why it matters.  Application asks them to use what they just learned.

Scenario: Debrief the station you just went through.

Activity: Divide into pairs. Practice asking open-ended questions of each other about the experience of the last station. Ask follow up questions as well. Write each question asked on a post it note then sort them based on where they fall in the experiential learning cycle (reflection, generalization, application).

Things to consider: Make sure your questions are elicitive. Elicitive questions draw out from participants their knowledge, wisdom, feelings, etc. An elicitive question is also an open question and cannot be answered “yes” or “no.”

Leave your collection of sorted questions at the station.