When planning adult learning and collaboration, it’s essential to design an experience that moves beyond a series of tasks or items to address. This is particularly true when guiding a group through conversations focused on issues of equity and other emotionally-charged challenges. Designing and Facilitating Meetings for Equity offers essential knowledge and skills for setting the conditions necessary for effective discussion and collaboration focused on equity work, as well as facilitation skills to support you to respond to the particular dynamics of the group you are working with.

Designing agendas and planning activities is a crucial foundation for productive collaboration – but even the best plans can be sidelined by participant anxieties or volatile emotions that create unproductive group dynamics. Facilitating the particular dynamics of any group is complex, challenging work – especially when guiding people through discussions and work focused on equity issues. 

This course will provide an opportunity to learn about and practice applying strategies and structures that support productive meetings that encourage full participation and engagement amongst your team. We will also help you to understand what’s underneath the challenges your group is facing and learn facilitation skills that can create a team with greater agency and effectiveness. In addition, we will model and provide strategies for deepening connections and engagement in virtual meetings and learning sessions.

Participants will:

• Experience a powerful model of effective virtual adult learning and learn how to design a similar experience in their own context

• Gain new knowledge and frameworks for agenda design, whole person learning, cultivating a positive group dynamic, and developing effective teams

• Learn about the neuroscience of emotion to help predict and respond to strong emotions in the group, especially when addressing equity issues

• Learn new strategies, get new tools (e.g. agenda templates, meeting activities, facilitation tips) and make a plan to use them in their context.

In addition to practice and skill development, you will:

• Strengthen how you understand and effectively facilitate groups of people as they work toward equity together

• Expanding your approach to designing meaningful collaboration and supporting groups to become effective equity-focused teams.

”I am so surprised that by the end of the day I could write an agenda that is better than 99% of the meetings I’ve attended or facilitated. Each piece of the day was thoughtfully crafted to lead me to that great moment.” 

– Elizabeth Little, Math for America

“As an outcomes-oriented person, this framework helps me to be attentive and intentional about the experiences I am designing as a leader. I loved the sheer volume of practices and engagement of the day’s session.”

– Caroline Mar, San Francisco Unified School District