Three months into the pandemic, I’ve noticed three facilitation and training trends.

First, the webinar wave. Lots of nonprofits and consultants started offering webinars: many for the first time, many for free, and many mediocre.

It’s easy to organize and present a webinar, but it’s difficult to do it well. During this first wave, I facilitated a bunch of webinars … about how to design and deliver really good webinars!

Next, the spring/summer conferences and workshops were postponed until fall. For a time, my September and October calendar filled with delayed in-person events.

More recently, clients are cancelling live events and moving everything online, including fall programs. Our emerging, evolving “new normal” won’t look much like the old one. Even when we are free to congregate, how many people will prefer to participate from home?

What do you expect next? Can you predict the future of training and facilitation? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Trainer adaptation: A success story

For years, I have co-facilitated the Training, Facilitation, and Consulting Certificate Program with my colleagues Stephanie Lahar and Dianne Russell. This six-month program begins and ends with three-day, in-person workshops in October and April.

That’s how we used to do it, before the pandemic.

In April, faced with COVID-19, we moved our final session online, engaging a dozen participants from eight states over three days. Tools and tricks to share with you:

• Zoom sessions were limited to 90 minutes, with breaks of 30 to 90 minutes.

• We mixed it up. Yes, we had the usual tools – polls, chat, breakouts – but also role plays, treasure hunts, and a drawing exercise. For a morning icebreaker, we asked participants to choose a head covering that displayed their trainer or facilitator superpower. They wore everything from clear plastic bowls (because facilitators “create the container”) to a stuffed unicorn (fostering imagination).

• We scheduled faculty office hours by phone, which limited Zoom fatigue and allowed for virtual walk-and-talk conversations at the end of each day.

• Almost half the content was led by participants, rather than the trainers.

Practicing virtual facilitation

The heart of this program is the facilitation and training lab. Participants design and deliver a training exercise or facilitation project in real time, with immediate feedback from peers.

We converted the facilitation lab into an online exercise, reflecting everyone’s new reality: designing and delivering your projects via videoconference. The students stepped up and did an amazing job.

It took massive amounts of time and creativity to move this complex program online. To our delight and relief, it worked really well. So yes – it can be done. You can do it, too.

VARK goes virtual 

We all learn a little differently. One learning theory is reflected in the acronym VARK: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic.

To be clear, many learners use all four of these channels, but most people tend to prefer one or two modalities. Visual learners absorb images, kinesthetic learners like to physically interact with the material, etc.

As a trainer, your job is to make your content accessible and engaging to a wide variety of learners and learning styles.

With online learning, the easy stuff is auditory – listening to the presenter, talking with others during breakouts – and visual. Please feature compelling, relevant images on all your slides!

For readers and writers, include text (but not too much). You can also pause your presentation to offer writing prompts, then gather feedback.

Which leaves the kinesthetic learners. How can you best serve and engage them in virtual world? Three examples:

• During our recent train-the-trainer program, we inverted the superpower metaphor by asking, “What’s your Kryptonite? What depletes you?” Then we instructed participants to walk around their homes and find a physical object representing their strategy for self-care and self-empowerment. Everyone was given a moment to describe the object and its significance.

• Using paper and markers, we asked them to create a drawing of their journey through the six-month program, then screen-share the image. These were really moving.

• For a different event – an online fundraising training – board members were encouraged to find an object that connected to the work of their organization. We then paired them up via breakouts to share a story about the object and its meaning.

The same principles – now use them online

An effective learning environment contains the same raw materials, regardless of the context. These include:

• Actively engaging a variety of learners and learning styles
• Balancing content presentation, group participation, and active reflection
• Distilling your materials down to the right amount

Apply these principles to online learning, as you would with an in-person group, and you’ll get great results.

For more on this topic, check out these related posts: Mastering Virtual Meetings and Training Remotely: A Facilitator’s Guide.