Facilitation Project: An Individual Reflection Paper.
As my group was the first group to facilitate a tutorial I believe that this added to our challenge as we did not have the benefit of observing other groups for ideas. For this reason I believe that our group put a lot of effort into project management. It is my opinion that the tutorial workshop on project planning helped us immensely. Through this workshop I gained the skills I needed such as identifying our strategic aim/goal for this project and what the deliverables and benefits were. We also used the information provided in the workshop to define the activities we would use, the sequence in which we would use them in the facilitation as well as the duration of each activity. We incorporated all of this information into a schedule for the facilitation task.
As a result of our group’s efforts, our peers through their evaluation and comments demonstrated to us that we had achieved our aims, goals and what we had set out to do. We received a lot of positive feedback in relation to the way in which we had set up the room. We chose to place the chairs around the room to produce an informal space in which to discuss that topic at hand. This seating arrangement was chosen because we believed that is was the best way to engage with all class members.
Our facilitation took the form of a focused group discussion where we as facilitators guided other tutorial members through a discussion of the topic. Taylor, Wilkinson and Cheers (2008, p.236) outline how focus groups are used to gather ideas and the opinions of others about a specific topic. I believe that this was the major aim of our group’s facilitation. One downfall of a focus group is that they are not as effective when they are used to gather information on controversial or sensitive topics (Taylor et al., 2008, 236). In an attempt to address this downfall we explained to the tutorial group that the environment in which the facilitation was to...