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1.4: Facilitation Strategies

  • Page ID
    2320
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    AWESOME Model

    Our AWESOME Model is a strategy for facilitators to use when planning any HealthCorps activity.

    • Active: Get the group moving at least once, even if it’s just to stand up and sit down.
    • Wiggle Room: It’s never going to go perfectly. Build in time and flexibility so that you have the capacity to be adaptable to the situation.
    • Engage & Interact: Get the audience talking and contributing. Don’t do all the talking. Change up group size! No meeting or HC lesson should feel like a lecture.
    • Structure: Always have an agenda, mini-lesson, clear flow of activities, and a clear closing.
    • Objective: Every lesson and meeting needs an objective, and all your activities should connect and contribute to that objective.
    • Measure Understanding: Examples include an exit ticket, thumbs up-down-middle, journal writing, a worksheet that’s submitted.
    • Entertain: Make it fun! Examples include snacks, pop culture references, music, and games.

    Strategies

    Other key facilitation strategies to ensure activities are both fun and effective and that the space the session is held encourages respect and participation:

    • Do Now: A task participants complete to capture everyone’s attention and formally begin the training on time.
    • Norms: Shared expectations among group members regarding how they should think, feel, and behave. Ask participants to share their own norms that they’d like to be a part of the training experience. As well Remember to start out with a few examples. (Optional: make it into a fun acronym! Example: OPRAH – one mic, participate, respect, ask questions and have fun)
    • Bike Rack: To stay on time and achieve session goals, have a poster board/paper hanging in the space where questions can be recorded and addressed, time permitting, at the end of the session.
    • Think-Pair-Share: Allow participants to discuss specific questions/scenarios in pairs or small groups which foster peer learning and sharing.
    • Brain Breaks: Model quick fitness routines or mental games intended to break up the content in a fun and energetic way. The goal is participants can replicate at their sites.
    • Temperature Check: A phrase used to gauge the participants’ level of engagement and understanding during the session.
    • Good/Better/Best: A positive way to frame healthy decision making that builds self-efficacy and is sensitive to health is personal. There are good choices, better choices, and best choices, but no bad choices.
    • Gallery Walk: Participant and/or facilitator notes on flip chart paper posted around the space for review throughout the day.
    • Exit Ticket: A task participants complete to measure their understanding and self-efficacy after the session is complete.

    Definitions of Activity Methods

    • Popcorn
    • Charades
    • Mad Minute
    • Snowball

    This page titled 1.4: Facilitation Strategies is shared under a CK-12 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by CK-12 Foundation via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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