Facilitation Matters – Spring 2025
Wednesday 12th March, 2025
Welcome to the latest issue of Facilitation Matters, Arthur Terry TSH’s newsletter dedicated to our team of facilitators. This term’s issue focuses on sharing insights and examples from our own experiences with participants.
As the Teaching School Hub for North Birmingham, we value and depend on the work of our visiting fellows and facilitators. We are determined to ensure you receive development and support as part of the deal. We will aim to keep Facilitation Matters to a 5 minute read.
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Facilitation Focus – creating and using examples
Preparing to facilitate training sessions for NPQs and ECF is challenging – there’s no two ways about it. We train you to plan and prepare for ‘high-fidelity’ delivery. That is the right thing to do, we know these curricula have been planned around a very strong evidence base and have been validated by DfE and EEF. Who are we, really, to question, alter and enhance these materials?
The trouble is, that determination to maintain absolute fidelity to the planned content can lead to sessions feeling generic, formulaic and at worst robotic. Clearly, none of us want our participants to leave one of our sessions feeling that their experience wasn’t tailored to their needs. One of the most efficient, impactful ways we can enhance the planned content is through sharing real examples from our experiences, which resonate with the concepts in the session we are leading.
However, it’s a tricky balance to strike. In a recent conversation with one of our participants, they told us “I’m really enjoying my sessions, and the facilitators are great”, but went on to say “sometimes I get a bit confused by all the stories they tell us. It starts to feel like the facilitator is just telling us all their accomplishments, like they’re reading from their CV.” So, if we’re not careful and deliberate with our examples, they can start to detract from the key concepts we are hoping to communicate.
The challenge is clear, we need to strike a delicate balance that allows us to share valuable insights and lived experiences with our participants to enhance and personalise their learning, without detracting from the key concepts.
Criteria for effective examples
An important first step in striking the right balance is to think more deliberately about the examples we choose, craft and use. Making these deliberate choices can be problematic because we don’t have clear criteria in mind. Ambition Institute has developed a comprehensive set of training materials for facilitators, and there are some helpful suggestions there that can help us to improve our practice in this area.
| 1. Link to Context “One way we can do this is to create and select examples and models that carefully match our participants contexts. We can activate prior knowledge by showing participants the connections between previous learning and new instruction using concrete examples and models.” | 2. Link to Active Ingredients “ensure that they follow the active ingredients of the strategy or concept you want to exemplify […] drawing on colleagues’ expertise will also help to ensure your models or examples demonstrate, with fidelity, what it is you want your participants to learn” |
Active ingredients – the essential, irreducible elements of a strategy or approach that must be maintained.
It might be helpful to think in terms of questions to ask ourselves when preparing examples:
- Is the example relevant for the context of those in the room?
- Does the example link explicitly to prior learning or the content that’s just been introduced?
- How can the active ingredients from today’s content be seen in this example?
- Does it provide an opportunity for those in the room to discuss, make links or reflect on the example in the context of the key learning?
It’s not realistic to think that we can predict and pre-empt every instance where we will need to use our own examples, an off-the-cuff example can often be a sign of a responsive facilitator who carefully listens to their participants. However, there is real value in carefully planning examples for crucial moments and key concepts ahead of time, to make sure they really complement participants’ existing knowledge and help them to build new understanding.
Building examples – deliberate practice
We appreciate that time is tight for all our facilitators, and that planning and preparation is often completed in their own time. It wouldn’t be fair to expect any of the team to take on a significant additional amount of work. So, we’re recommending a simple, streamlined process for planning examples and models:
Our challenge to you as facilitators is to use this process to carefully craft one example for your next session. All our facilitators work in pairs, so your partner might be an ideal colleague to use for step 5. If that is not possible or convenient, you can always contact the TSH team and we will find time to support you.
If you facilitate one of our NPQ programmes, you can access the full facilitator training library from Ambition Institute: Facilitator Training Library | StepLab Some of the ideas and resources in this issue are drawn from Section 6 ‘Facilitating Curriculum Content’, with thanks to Ambition Institute.
This newsletter is not just about sharing our feedback and findings with you. We have been gathering feedback from facilitators, and we’re working hard to respond. If you have recently delivered an ECF session and want to feedback, contact angela.whitehouse@atlp.org.uk
If you recently led an NPQ clinic or conference, and haven’t had the chance to share your feedback, please use this link to get in touch: Facilitator Survey
Thank you for reading Facilitation Matters, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need support, or if you have suggestions for how we can continue to improve the experience for facilitators.
