The Discussion Book

Chapter 50

Facilitator Summary

As a facilitator you want to encourage as much free-flowing discussion as possible. But as it proceeds, you occasionally hear contributions that you think are uninformed, omit important data, or display a fundamental misunderstanding of what's being talked about. What to do? If a previously taciturn group is finally starting to catch conversational fire the last thing you want to do is douse the flames by correcting people who are speaking up for the first time. In such situations we use the Facilitator Summary, a time at the end of the session reserved for us to make some overall comments. Here we owe a debt to Ira Shor's (1997) notion of dialogic lecturing: making observations that are grounded in earlier ...