How to design and plan your session(s)?

During the last years we have collected templates for interactive remote exercises, icebreakers and energizers, and we have various repositories of others activities and facilitation tips. Here we would like to share with you our example of session(s) design outline, checklist and our template that we are using - hoping these can be helpful.

Session(s) design outline

Session(s) design checklist and preparation template

Title [Think of the title that unlocks imagination, that is creative, inspiring and welcoming]

Purpose [What is the session about and where do we intend to land]. A session is a stepping stone in the overall arc of the meeting. Make sure you have clear the overall arc of the event you are contributing and co-creating. Identify one up to three goals your session aim to address. The Purpose has two kinds of statements: 1) What do we want to achieve? and 2) Where do we hope to land? You can develop a tailored specific purpose for your session.

People and Roles – Online facilitation is characterized by fragmentation of spaces which asks for dedicated people to look after so that participants can experience the spaces with easiness. Define your team and agree on back channels or ways to address and respond to glitches or provide support to participants.

Based on our experience we have identified the roles below. They can be played by different people or some of them can play multiple roles. We always make sure our team feels comfortable with playing more roles. Wider facilitation team is made of:

Exercises and Materials - These are activities that unfold the arc of your session and that support achieving the purpose. They can be various and inspired by different methodologies. The most used ones are icebreakers, energizers, brainstorming, role-play, facilitated discussions, etc. Activities can be done all together in plenary, in small groups or individually.

Preparation – This is the detailed description of each item on the agenda. It indicates the duration of each item, who is doing what, which materials will be used (from crayons and papers for drawing, doing collages, to links and specific online tools that will be used and tech support that might be necessary. We hope our template below will support you in your preparation as part of the checklist. The preparation is shared whenever is possible with the documentation team.

Agenda – The agenda is a short description of the various items that are part of the session. It includes time duration of each item, breaks. An item can include more than one activity, there is not a fixed amount of items that compose an agenda. It can be shared with participants before the session or at its opening. An agenda usually includes: title of the activity, duration, and additionally you can add the name of who is leading different activities.

Preparation template

Time

Activity

 Exercise/methodology

Duration

Who

Materials

 

Opening

 

 

 

 

 

Activity 1

 

 

 

 

 

Activity 2

 

 

 

 

 

Break

 

 

 

 

 

Activity ...

 

 

 

 

 

Closing

 

 

 

 

 


Revision #1
Created 28 October 2021 05:49:01 by Cathy
Updated 28 October 2021 05:50:51 by Cathy