How To Facilitate Discussion and End Workshop Silence

If you have ever facilitated a workshop or a class or a training session, I know how exciting the potential of discussions can be.

These engrossing discussions we imagine include positive tension and many different points-of-view.  They include aha moments, smiles and scowls and furrowed brows.  They are driven by the participants themselves to the point that the discussion takes on a life of its own.  

We’ve done it! Our participants came in expecting a boring and dry waste of their time because of all the past drudgery they have sat through - but this time was different!

That is what we as facilitators dream of…

 So why do these discussions rarely ever happen?

Why does no one raise their hand when I ask questions?

Why do folks spend more time on their devices then engaged in the conversation?

Why does getting engagement from people WHO SIGNED UP for the workshop feel like pulling teeth?!

Whenever programming feels dull or lacks engagement, it is important to first look at the context and the facilitation - which usually means looking in the mirror.  If you are the facilitator of a workshop, you are the biggest factor in its success or failure, plain and simple. 

Your setup, framing, leading, and wrapping all determine the experience you and your participants will have.  Unfortunately, most of us screw this up on our own, in subtle ways that are both counter-intuitive and near impossible to be aware of, at least at first.  Then you are left wondering if anyone - even just one person! - got any value at all out of your session.

The upshot? With just a few new, simple tactics and a newfound level of awareness, you can energize all of your workshops, trainings, and sessions without changing much at all.

Participant Psychology & Experience Design

To improve your programs starts with refocusing your perspective.  You first need to start with how you think about your participants.  Instead of thinking about their roles and responsibilities, think about their psyche.  

What are they probably feeling before coming into your session?  

What are they thinking about?  

What goals might they have related to your session?

What is at stake for them - in the session and after?

As facilitators, the first thing you must do is stop thinking from your own point-of-view and instead, put yourself in your participants shoes.  Most of us get so fixated on how the participants will perceive us that we forget that they are concerned about the exact same thing.  

Here’s why that matters.

Whether you are in-person or virtual, facilitators that hope to create a highly engaged audience need to realize that their program is inherently a social experience.  And when people are in a social experience, their attention is split between your material and their own thoughts about how they sound, look, feel and appear to others.  It’s not ideal, but it is human nature.  

Consequently, your participants are going to be hyper-sensitive to how they come off to the other participants. This means that how you structure and facilitate your session can have a profound impact on the level of participation.

Here are three ways facilitators typically undermine their own experience - and how to do it differently:

How You Frame the Session

The first impression of your program starts before the session even begins.  In today’s world, most facilitators have become organized enough to provide an agenda and sometimes even pre-work ahead of time, which is great!

However, the agendas that get shared typically only give a skeleton sense of what the actual experience is going to be, along with what participants can start thinking about ahead of time.  

What is the goal of the session?

What questions are we going to wrestle with?

What is the room like? Is it cold?  Should I bring a sweater?

Most importantly, are you going to ask/force me to talk to OTHER PEOPLE?!

The more details you can share in advance about not just the content, but the physical and psychosocial experience people will have, the more primed and comfortable everyone will be when they arrive.  

This is especially effective for those of us who are more introverted in new environments.  If we have enough details to do a little more mental modeling of what the session will be like, we warm up a lot quicker!

Send your participants details ahead of time on what they can expect to think about, feel, and do during your session and you will immediately clear out more of our headspace for what you have to share with us.

How You Ask Questions

When you are ready to engage your participants, the types of questions you ask them will ultimately determine whether you get the engagement you are looking for.  However, most facilitators do not take into account the social risk/reward calculation that goes through the mind of every participant when a question is asked.

Whenever a facilitator - or professor or teacher or boss - poses a question, pretty much every participant does an instant calculation as to whether it is worth answering or not.  

Let’s consider an example.  Imagine a typical college class led by a professor.  The students in the class were expected to read a few chapters prior to the class.  So what does the professor do?  They start the session by posing a question like the following:

Can somebody summarize what the chapters were about?

What were the main points in the reading?

The professor figures that this is a quick and simple way to kick off the class, “check” if folks did the reading, and ensure everyone is on the same page as to what the reading said.  Sounds reasonable enough?

Unfortunately, that type of question is all risk, no reward because it is an objective question, meaning there are specifically right answers and specifically wrong answers.  

For a participant, if they answer this question correctly - which means including all of the info that the professor has in their mind that qualifies as a “summary” of a reading - then all they do is prove they did what they were supposed to.

But if they get the answer to this objective question wrong, then they look foolish, even if they did the reading!  

More importantly, while this public intellectual dressing down may make the professor feel righteous, I can assure you that it has an enormous chilling effect on the rest of the group from that moment on.

And either way, the professor (i.e. facilitator) is almost certainly going to provide their own summary right afterwards anyways, so what is the point of this exercise?

In teaching, educators often refer to something called Bloom’s Taxonomy when creating questions of any type.  The taxonomy is a framework that generally identifies the various levels of complexity and thinking required of questions to assist educators in pushing their students to higher order thinking.  Memory, or “recall,” questions are at the most basic level.

Asking objective recall questions to adults (or young adults for that matter) is essentially just a memory assessment.  It adds little to no value to the respondent, the other participants, or to you and your time in the session.

A better approach to our professor scenario might be as follows:

Professor opens the class with their own bulleted summary of the reading as they see it. Participants are given 3 minutes to jot down their own answers to two questions:

• What stood out most to you in the reading? Why?
• Was there anything interesting that was not included in the professor's summary?

By providing their own summary first, the professor is able to jump right into material without the wasted time of piecing together a summary from the students.  Moreover, they are able to engage every participant using subjective questions that are of a slightly higher order and still reinforce the expectation that students are expected to do the readings.  

The professor could also add in 2 minutes for participants to share their responses with each other before bringing the group back together, allowing every participant the opportunity to get activated as soon as the session begins

Simple changes to what questions you ask and how you ask them - going from objective questions to subjective ones - can have a powerful impact on the level of engagement in your programming.

When You Expect Answers

Question format and type has a major influence on engagement, but your role as a facilitator does not stop there.  One of the most overlooked aspects of facilitating a discussion is something called “wait time” - or the amount of time given to participants before an answer is expected and shared.

We all know the scenes well.  Facilitator asks a question and 1-2 informed (or over-eager) participants immediately raise their hand once the question has been read as if they are hitting their clicker on Jeopardy!  As the facilitator, you might love these participants because they are the antidote to one of our greatest fears when facilitating - silence.  No one likes to sit awkwardly in silence waiting for someone - ANYONE! - to respond to the question posed.  

However, as we have seen in the sections above, the way in which we set up and ask questions are both major contributors to a situation like that - and so is the amount of time you give to participants to think about their answers!

Research has firmly established that giving participants 3-5 seconds to think about the question before accepting responses allows for a much greater number of folks to engage with the question itself.  In a nutshell, we all process things in different ways and at slightly different speeds.  Sometimes, it can even take a few seconds just to process what the question was in the first place!

So what do you do?  As you ask your question, let everyone know that you are going to give them 5 seconds to think about their responses before raising their hands.  You can also set this norm at the outset of the session (or in your framing email ahead of time to put your overachievers on notice :).  And if you want to be a real pro, you will also allow 3-5 seconds to pass after each response to allow for participants to process and react to those as well.

As Dan Levy from Harvard University states, wait-time is “one of the most underused weapons that an instructor has at his/her disposal.”

Give your participants a few seconds after you pose each question and you will be amazed at the improvement in engagement you are likely to see.

Wrap Up & Get Out

Realizing your dreams of highly stimulating discussions and consistent engagement in your programs is possible.  It all comes down to finding more ways to make your participants feel comfortable and secure, which makes it easier for them to jump into the experience.

Let them know what to expect ahead of time.  Ask subjective questions that encourage them to share their opinions and bounce off one another.  Give them time after questions are posed or responded to so that they can process the point, gather their own thoughts, and be ready to engage themselves.

Need help boosting your program’s engagement & impact? Learn more about how we help here.