Pointers for facilitating group discussions
Managing or facilitating a group discussion so that everyone gets the most out of it is a
skill that needs to be learnt and developed. Through practice, and review of your practice,
you will become better able to prepare and communicate your ideas, encourage all
participants to contribute their ideas and build on each other’s contributions, achieve the
objectives in the given time and motivate people do any follow-up work. The following
pointers will help you to do this and the suggested activity what follows will allow you to put
them into practice!
•
Make sure that individuals can check their understanding of what you are saying by
suggesting that they ask questions, where relevant, as you present your ideas or
record questions and ask them when you have finished presenting.
•
You might begin the group discussion by suggesting what you see the aim of the
discussion as being (e.g. Our aim is that that by the end of this discussion we will
have identified reasons in favour of the library being open 24hours a day)
•
In order to encourage all members of the group to participate in the discussion you
might:
o Begin by ‘brainstorming’ ideas. This means making a list of all the ideas
suggested on the given topic, without judgment – the ideas can be
discussed, evaluated and refined later. You might ask everyone to share at
least one idea.
o If the group is larger than 10 and you think people might not be confident
enough to share their ideas to the larger group ask people to discuss their
ideas in pairs, giving them chance to better formulate their suggestions
before feeding them back to the larger group.
o Ask members who haven’t shared their ideas if they have any suggestions.
o When people do contribute, show that you value their contribution by making
a positive comment about it and try to make a link between it and other ideas
already discussed.
o If one member of the group is ‘taking over’ and doing all the talking thank
them for their contribution and say something like “perhaps another
participant has a comment to make”
•
It is useful to the group if you are able to make comments about the relationships
between contributions as the discussion progresses and use these to guide the
discussion towards achieving the aim of the discussion. For example, “It seems like
we have a general consensus regarding the need for more education for students
around how to avoid committing plagiarism. Let’s consider now how we might
organise opportunities for this to happen.”
•
If you think it will be useful for the group to have brief notes of what was discussed
and list of actions that you have agreed need to be taken as a result of the meeting
you might ask a group member if they would take notes. It will be difficult for you to
facilitate and take useful notes.
This resource was created by Kate Ippolito from the LearnHigher CETL at Brunel University and is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/