The course is conducted as a group, so that you can always see and feel how skills are actually applied. Contact days are ’supportively challenging’. You will learn great things about yourself and provide a much stronger and more practical foundation for your facilitation skills.

The course comprises key units that meld together relevant theory and practice.  There is a strong emphasis on developing facilitation micro skills, working with different types of groups, and your particular challenges and issues. 

There are 20 contact day spread over the year.  After the first course formation day, there is a five day residential block.  In the subsequent two day blocks, we focus on the relevant learning unit.  To complement this, students bring issues from their work, and/or prepare for upcoming challenges.

Unit 1: Develop and Use Self Awareness and Emotional Resilience in Groups

The more we understand ourself, the better facilitators we will be.  Becoming conscious of unrecognised ‘drivers’ can dramatically improve our capacity to first facilitate ourself!  Therefore, self reflection is threaded throughout the course.

This unit includes:

• a model for understanding ‘The Unconscious at Work’
• mapping our own Community of Selves™
• getting to know and working on the fears and other self limiting messages that hold us back as group facilitators.

Unit 2: Develop and Apply Facilitation Practice Principles

Facilitation practice needs to have a strong, clear value base.  As facilitators we need to be able to articulate our values and principles, for ourselves and for the groups we facilitate.

This unit includes:

• exploring and articulating our own values
• developing faciliation practice principles
• applying these principles to group process design
• applying facilitation practice principles during facilitation

Unit 3: Use Facilitation Micro Skills to Work with a Groups Purpose
 

A competent facilitator needs an array of interpersonal communication skills.  The Groupwork Institute has clarified these by developing our own set of facilitation micro skills.  Many of these skills may be well known to you, but never before articulated in such a useful way.

This unit includes:

• learning the Groupwork Institute’s facilitation micro skills
• setting learning goals
• developing the micro skills so they become second nature

Unit 4: Create a Group

A collection of individuals is different to a group.  A group has the capacity to achieve great things together.

This units includes:

• different types of groups and approaches to groupwork
• establishing a group and setting the scene
• setting clear group agreements
• ’safety’ and belonging, facilitating group ownership
• resources for formation of groups

So much of what goes on in groups has an emotional content.  Much of it is to do with our unconscious.  It is understanding this dynamic that enables the full potential of the group to be realised.  Participants will learn to identify the signs of unconscious dynamics and their effect and develop the skills to work with these towards the group’s purpose.

This unit includes:

• understanding the full spectrum of group dynamics
• the role of unspoken, unconscious dynamics
• working with different aspects people bring into groups
• understanding the roles people play, and can get stuck in
• Field Theory  - understanding all the ‘players on the field’.

To develop the most appropriate process, we need to balance leadership, planning, flexibility and a willingness to negotiate with the group.

This unit includes:

• different facilitation roles including co-facilitation
• negotiating with groups about your role
• design, planning and preparation of group processes
• scribing and writing-up
• evaluation

This area is often overlooked in the study of groupwork. Yet marginalisation can take many forms and brings with it myriad challenges for facilitators.  We ignore it at our peril!

This unit includes:

• understanding how rank and power is played out in groups
• encouraging and working with difference
• dominant/non-dominant groups and the effect on group dynamics
• understanding how our own rank affects our facilitation

Organisations have their own function, structures and culture.  As facilitators, it is desireable to have frameworks to guide our work with organisations.  Competency in this arena is strategic for career development.

This unit includes:

• framework for organisational mapping
• negotiating a clear facilitation role
• strategic planning
• balancing organisational expectations with wishes of the group you are facilitating
• making organisational training more dynamic

Most of us have fears and various avoidance behaviour around conflict.  As facilitators, this will have a negative impact on our work.   We need strategies to deal with our own and other’s feelings and reactive behaviour.

This unit includes:

• understanding our own and other’s responses to conflict
• identifying the common causes of conflict in groups
• working with ‘hot spots’ and ‘flat spots’
• identifying and using group processes for confict resolution
• managing challenging behaviour
• challenges to your facilitation

All groups are required to make decisions throughout their life as a group.   This unit will be especially useful for facilitating effective work teams or task group outcomes. 

This unit includes:

• different types of decision making approaches and their applications
• developing decision making principles
• collaborative decision making – why it is so powerful in its transformative capacity and yet so challenging to implement
• the decision making process and how to facilitate it.

To remain focused in our work we need to be personally centred and in good shape.  We all know it is essential to take care of ourselves, however, this is easier said than done.
 

This unit includes:

• understanding and addressing the difficulties involved in facilitation and the effect this has on us
• ways of taking better care of ourselves
• practical tools for prioritising and tracking our objectives
• assessing our professional development needs