Organization of a structured and aligned seminar/course takes a lot of prior planning and ground work. It starts with accommodating the learning process of the participants with respect to their special needs. The next warrant of a successfully organized and realized seminar is the smooth communication in the facilitators' team with well-defined and assigned tasks and jointly constructed working conditions and terms.
In our activities we should ensure, that participants from different social categories may involve. There are practical and fundamental reasons. Practically speaking, inclusion of different background helps us to disseminate our ideas, to spread the word, to increase sustainability. In other words: Let's use the potential of diversity for our work.
Environments can support creativity of our learners. The checklist might help to make use of the existing opportunities in a space. How could they best respond to seeking, digging, and wellbeing of creative learners?
A checklist for finding a place for a non-formal education training or other similar events.
A checklist for security issues in regard to the wellbeing of participants.
Practical ideas for planning your workshops in a globally responsible way
In contrast to most trainings and seminars you might set vegetarian food as "normal" and ask those, who eat meat, to announce that to the organizers, so they could order meat for them. Often teams do it the other way round, where vegetarians have to announce it particularly, that they dont want to eat meat.
After selection of your participants it is useful to inform then as early as possible. Especially in international contexts we have to keep in mind, that visa need to be organized or that travel connections should be booked earliest to reduce costs. As well participants need information about the background, the place and the conditions.
In times, where a lot of communication takes places electronically, we have to rethink our care for privacy and for privacy of our participants. Currently most communication data might be stored and analized through those who are not the addressee. For maintaining privacy we need to use specific tools that make surveillance less possible or even impossible. Beyond this defensive motivation there could be another reason for showing interest for technical tools for protection. Privacy means not only to defend ourselves against nosey pencil pushers. Through a privacy-aware attitude civil actors contributes to more quality of communication and shape spaces of confidentiality.
Bullet journalling is a creative methodology how to strucuture notes and thoughts, and how to save thoughts and inspiration. It can be used by facilitators and participants , in example in learning journals or in note-keeping.
Wechange is an online collaboration platform for societal change.
Here come five easy and straightforward methods for boosting the participants' involvement in the training organization, delivery and evaluation and thereby increasing their sense of ownership.
Team Collaboration for Facilitators
Tight cooperation and effective teamwork among the facilitators ensures appropriately designed and delivered seminar. It requires all the team members’ active involvement in planning, delivering and assessing the seminar. This active involvement paired up with pro-activeness and openness to give and receive feedback results in professional growth for the facilitators.
A team of facilitators is diverse in terms of their preferences and working style. This checklist helps you to reflect your working style and to talk in your team about your personal preferences.
Every team is different because teams differ in terms of their qualifications and in terms of characters. The Johari window helps you to get to know yourself as well as your team members better. This helps you to develop your team work according to the needs and qualities of the team.
Feedback is a method that was developed to improve the quality of interpersonal communication, in terms of relevance (giving relevant information) as well of moral quality (showing interpersonal respect). It is a skill that has to be improved upon and includes often very useful information. In order to gain from this information people need to develop the capacities to give and receive feedback.
A small but useful method, that supports the development of your team. Also in situations of dispute but not merely
