How did the workshop go relative to your plans/expectations?
I tried to minimize my expectations! But it went really well. Everyone was engaged and participated, and I didn’t have to do much to get the conversation going. I’m sure this could go very differently with another group, and I’m grateful that for my first run, I had such a great group of people.
If you collaborated with others, speak to how well the collaboration worked, including the sharing of responsibility/work on the workshop.
I did this one alone, and I’m really happy I did. It would have been easier in some ways to have someone else with me, but I think I would have let them do some of the things that scared me, and this forced me into a position to step up and lead the workshop. I loved making the slides and thinking through the structure, which included a lot of time to get to know each other. I think I’d like all my workshops to be opportunities to build connections and not just learn something.
If you could change anything about this workshop, what would you change?
I wish I had been able to get mugs! Next time I will. I could have done a better job in some of the full group conversations after the small group conversations of recapping what was said, this is something that makes me really nervous and is something I need to work on. I get so in my head that I can’t summarize. I have the Facilitators guide to Participatory Decision Making, and I want to spend a lot of time reading that before the next workshop.
What was the most successful aspect of this workshop?
The final decision was really fun. I asked them to develop a proposal for how we could spend the rest of our time together. The proposal was to do Plank for the rest of the class. And it was a GREAT example because there were lots of clarifying questions and I think sometimes we assume we’ll all agree with the decision, but no one wanted to do this, and it was great practice at disagreeing. Also, the conversations were just amazing. They took on a life of their own, and I let them know at the beginning of the workshop that we could change course at any time, and while we mostly kept to the plan, it left room to have conversations veer off in interesting directions.
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