The first week of conversation circles is over and I had massively different experiences in my two groups! My Tuesday group had three people show up and conversation had some issues chugging along, which didn't surprise me since it was a first meeting (as a group and for me as a facilitator) and it was a slightly small group. We did have some good conversation though, and we all left as a group still talking when our hour was up, which made me happy and feel relatively successful.
My Wednesday group was a full set of 6 plus me, and they were so talkative! I was ready to bring my A game to keep conversation flowing after the group the day before, but they took any prompt I offered and ran with it. Granted, there are a different set of issues in that group with making sure that everyone is getting a chance to speak and keeping myself aware that we were dealing with a varied skill set when it came to English levels. I think I'll have to engage each group each week with a fairly different approach, matching the obstacles facing each group in the ease and flow of conversations.
These different approaches to fostering genuine conversation between the different groups might range from putting forth a topic and encouraging the group members to engage with each other, replying to comments or posing questions about their experiences to each other rather than from me, to encouraging each person with some open ended questions to expand on their own thoughts. I'll have to keep putting in the work on my end to offer some interesting starting points, but I do think that it'll start to become more reliant on what the group as a whole is interested in, so I'm looking forward to that!
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