Programs - Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills, Level 2
Online Registration (not available at this time)
Location: UMaine Extension, 992 Waterville Rd, Waldo ME 04915 in the conference room accessible from lower parking lot
A seven-part workshop series designed to teach citizens to effectively lead community groups
Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills, Level 2 objectives:
- Observe and address facilitation opportunities and challenges that some with the multiple roles that facilitators may assume within groups;
- Practice skills as a facilitator-trainer and receive focused feedback; and
- Commit to building community capacity by volunteering facilitation skills to a community group or organization.
Foundations
The SYFS, Levels 1 and 2 Training Series, is based on a framework that reflects the IAF (International Association of Facilitators) six foundational facilitator competencies:
- Creating collaborative client relationships;
- Planning appropriate group processes;
- Creating and sustaining a participatory environment;
- Guiding the group to appropriate and useful outcomes;
- Building and maintaining professional knowledge;
- Modeling a positive professional attitude.
Of the six foundational facilitator competencies, the majority of the training focuses in three competency areas:
- Creating an environment of participation
- Guiding the group process and
- Encouraging creative thinking
The Framework
The framework within which the SYFS, Levels 1 and 2 Curricula were developed models Best Facilitation Practices. The overall format of the Curriculum embraces a solid adult education model where learning unfolds progressively, sequentially and experientially. The Curriculum allows for this to happen in the course of the each Lesson and, more complexly, continuing through six months of learning before the Level 2 Training Series is complete.
Participant requirements:
- Being in a community facilitating role at least once per month.
- Discussing my on-going growth as a facilitator with the trainers and other participants.
- Honoring all participants’ requests for confidentiality.
- Attending all sessions (acknowledging that life happens).
- Being a member of a day-long focus group in April or May 2010 that maps the activities and competencies used in Level 2
- Writing an article.
- Mentoring.
- Helping to teach Level I.
- Helping plan a regional facilitation conference
- Assisting with the production of distance learning modules, such as Webinars, podcasts, and electronic consulting.
- Giving back to the community (note: check one or more ways): o Facilitating a group of whom I am not a member.
Training Components are interactive:
- multi-sensory and multiple intelligence learning styles
- establishing social, cognitive and physical facilitation climates
- juggling and balance o conflict: theory and practice
- facilitation tips, tools, techniques, and methods
- the heart and soul of facilitation
- trust, collaboration and leadership
Training topics include:
- multi-sensory learning styles
- multiple intelligence
- establishing social, cognitive and physical facilitation climates
- managing disruptive behaviors
- conflict: views, responses, styles of management
- relational interaction
- facilitation tips, tools, techniques, methods and templates
- facilitator self-care
- the ‘being’ of facilitation
- making it look easy: discipline
When SYFS2 participants were surveyed six to nine months after their program was completed, everyone reported they had reconsidered or changed their role as a member of a group. Three-quarters of participants said they talk less, have increased confidence when facilitating, improved the efficiency of their meetings, reduced their groups’ frustration and have greater participation by members of their groups.
Folks who have taken the training have said that skills they obtained are “percolating out into the community”. These communities in which percolating has happened are, indeed, in Maine and beyond, in a diversity that we had no way of envisioning – local Quaker meetings, New England and national level Green Party meetings, in Kenyan villages, the Maine Department of Labor, local Cooperative Extension executive committees and local town selectmen meetings are a sampling of the ripples. Other expressions of the impact that these citizens facilitators notice include, they feel they are “breeding people who are excited to be in groups” and that these people who have observed and adopted skills from their citizen group leader or facilitator will then “cultivate on their own whatever it is that they are doing.”
Meet the Presenters:
The Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills (SYFS), Level 1 Training Series was initially developed in 2001 by Extension Professionals Jane Haskell and Louise Franck Cyr. A pilot of Level 2 was tested in 2004 by Haskell and Frank Cyr; it was fully developed and designed in 2009 by Haskell and McPhail.
Beginning in 2006, Haskell and Franck Cyr along with Gabe McPhail, developed the SYFS Training Series into the National Curriculum, Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills, Level 1. McPhail joined Haskell as a co-trainer in 2006.
Haskell and McPhail will facilitate Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills Level 2
Jane Haskell
Extension Educator
University of Maine Cooperative Extension
992 Waterville Rd
Waldo ME 04915
Jane brings over 20 years of experience in the design and implementation of experiential community development programs for youth and adults. Over the years she has launched several innovative Extension programs, from Voices, a school-based enrichment program for teens, to the Mid-Coast Home-Based Business Conference, the first statewide conference for home-based business owners in Maine, to producing and hosting Doing Business, a live, public affairs radio show. As a result of her community facilitation work, her latest innovation is the collaborative creation of Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills, Levels 1 and 2. The Training Series is designed to help local citizens as well as professional staff learn how to get work done more effectively and efficiently in group meetings. Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills, Level 1 has been used to train scores of volunteers and staff from over 30 organizations in Maine, and is now being used to train new Extension staff as well as citizens in other states. It has been identified as a curriculum by the National 4-H Learning Priorities to Build Effective Organizational Systems. Jane is working collaboratively to research the societal impact of having skilled community facilitators. She is a member of the International Association of Facilitators and the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals.
Gabe McPhail
Community Group Facilitator, Professional Illustrator and Graphic Designer
Gabe is a graduate of both Level 1 and Level 2 Strengthening Your Facilitation Skills. She is an active community volunteer and worked with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension for six years as an Executive Committee member. Since completing her SYFS training, Gabe has facilitated for several non-profit organizations throughout Maine. Since 2004, she has co-facilitated the SYFS Level 1 training with Jane Haskell. Gabe is a professional illustrator and graphic designer and owner of Workshop 31 (workshop31.com), a multimedia art studio on Vinalhaven. She also works as Assistant Director for Vinalhaven’s Arts & Recreation Center, a non-profit Community Center that promotes youth and adults working together with the community, for the community (vharc.org).
Participants have said:
- “I was able to keep a very difficult group focused on the job and prevent difficult member from dominating the meetings.”
- Groups I lead can work through emotion to reach calm analysis and then proceed systematically to achieve together.”
- “I moved a group from stagnation and disinterest to a pace of enthusiasm, excitement, stronger personal responsibility among group members, appreciation by group members of concrete structure (having ground rules and an agenda and sticking to it!) and respect for individuals members.”
- “My confidence level is boosted so I can take charge, identify problems, and sort out techniques, put questions back to the group and figure out how to let them go where they want to go so much better than before.”
- “I have noticed that because I do better at providing agendas and opportunities for group members to add to the agenda before the meeting, and better schedule time, the group has become more focused, stays on task better and seems to accomplish more. People also now call and apologize if they miss a meeting and are eager to hear what happened! The group I am referring to has become so much more productive in moving the organization forward to the goals we have established.”
For more information, email jane.haskell@maine.edu or call UMaine Extension Waldo County at 1-800-287-1426
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