Before I talk about my experience as a second-time Chat Facilitator I would like to acknowledge why it is I signed up for round 2. After the first semester, although I spent a lot of time getting to know my participants, I felt as though I could better job at not only facilitating conversations but also creating relationships between the participants and myself. Also, this summer I will be going to India to facilitate a class of international students as they journey around the country, so I thought practicing and improving my facilitating skills would be beneficial to my summer internship. So, from day one of “Chat Café Part Deuxs” I have had the active goal to use my experience from last semester to create a better learning platform for both my participants and myself. That being said, this semester is completely different from my last semester. Last semester I had a regular group of 5 or 6 participants, this semester I have had a regular group of 3. Most of the time all 3 participants show up, however, there have been sessions with just 2 participants and on occasion, I have even gotten to experience a 1 on 1 session. Another change from last semester to this semester is the rooming situation. Last semester my group only wanted to meet in one location for the whole semester, however, this semester, my participants have expressed interest in moving around campus each week for sessions. The first handful of weeks we moved from lounge to lounge around campus. This was a challenge for me. Each week I had to find the different lounge with the right environment to host a chat group. Eventually, I realized that I could reserve study rooms at the Shapiro library. The group loved the reserved room so much we just reserve a different room in Shapiro each week.
The main difference in my style from last semester to this semester is that I am much more flexible with my sessions now. Last semester I would try to come up with themes each week to generate topics. These themes ended up trapping the conversation and stunted natural conversation. This semester I come to each meeting with little to no preparation. Sometimes I will bring articles from the Michigan Daily in and we will talk about the general idea of the article, however, the article serves as a jumping off point for the conversation, not the main topic. One strategy I have used in both semesters is starting the meeting off with roses and thorns, basically, each member says something good about their week, ad something bad about their week. I usually use topics brought up from roses and thorns as jumping off points for the conversation. I just started using table topics in my facilitation as well. I learned about table topics from my time with a public speaking club called toastmasters. The idea of table topics is that a speaker is given a question like “talk about a time someone was nice to you, how did it make you feel?” then the speaker gives a quick speech for 30-60 seconds. After the speech, the person sitting on the left of the speaker give a constructive comment and the person on the right gives a compliment. I’ve adopted table topics to my group after asking them if they would be interested in that exercise. This week was the first implementation of table topics and my group really enjoyed it.
Apart from the small differences in my facilitating style, I would say the biggest difference is that I constantly seek feedback from my participants this semester. Usually, in the last 5 minutes of the meeting, I’ll ask my group if there is anything that I could do better or if they have any suggestions for next session. This constant feedback from my group has allowed me to try new techniques as well as improve my overall skillset as a facilitator.
Overall I was really on the edge about signing up for a second round of Chat Café, however, this semester has been really rewarding so far and I can't wait to see how both my group members and I grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment