Set up an activity clearly, ask questions that make people think, and debrief with What? So what? Now what?
Why it matters
A well-designed lesson can still fall flat in the room. Facilitation is the skill of running the session so that learners do the thinking: setting up activities clearly, managing time and energy, asking questions that make people reason, and, above all, debriefing so an activity turns into learning instead of just an experience.
Throughout this course we follow one example: a technical trainer at a software company onboarding new support engineers onto the company's incident-response tool (opening incidents, setting severity, escalating, and writing the post-incident summary).
Trainer, presenter, facilitator
A presenter transmits information. A facilitator designs and guides an experience where learners work things out, then helps them make sense of it. Good technical trainers switch between both: a short explanation, then an activity, then a debrief. A useful rule of thumb from instructional practice (and consistent with Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, 2012) is to present new material in small steps and check understanding often, rather than lecturing for long stretches.
Setting up an activity
Most failed activities fail in the first minute because instructions were unclear. A reliable setup:
- Purpose: "This will help you decide severity under time pressure."
- Task: what to do, in one or two sentences.
- Output: what they will have at the end ("one severity choice per ticket, with a one-line reason").
- Groups and roles: who works with whom; who records.
- Time: "You have eight minutes."
- Check: ask one person to repeat the task back before you start the clock.
Put the instructions on a slide or card so people can refer back to them.
Example activity for our support engineers: each pair gets five realistic incident tickets and must assign severity (SEV1 to SEV4) using the company's severity matrix.
During the activity
- Circulate and listen; do not hover or take over.
- Note interesting disagreements to use in the debrief ("Pair 3 rated ticket C as SEV2, pair 5 as SEV4").
- Give time warnings ("two minutes left").
- If most groups are stuck on the same thing, pause everyone for a 30-second clarification instead of repeating it to each group.
The debrief
David Kolb's experiential learning cycle (1984) describes learning from experience as a loop: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization (drawing general lessons), and active experimentation (trying them out). An activity gives the experience; the debrief does the rest.
A simple, widely used structure is What? So what? Now what? (associated with Terry Borton's 1970 work and developed by Gary Rolfe and colleagues in 2001):
| Stage | Purpose | Example questions |
|---|---|---|
| What? | Describe what happened | "Which tickets did pairs disagree on?" "What information did you look for first?" |
| So what? | Make sense of it | "Why did ticket C split the room?" "What does the severity matrix assume that the ticket did not tell you?" |
| Now what? | Apply it | "What will you check first on your next live ticket?" "What would you ask the customer?" |
Close by connecting the insights to the objective, and capture them where learners can see them.
Questioning techniques
- Open questions ("What made you choose SEV2?") beat closed ones ("Was it SEV2?").
- Wait time: Mary Budd Rowe's research found that when teachers waited about three seconds or more after a question, students gave longer, more thoughtful answers and more of them answered. Count silently to five before rescuing the silence.
- No hands up, then cold call kindly: give everyone think time, then invite specific people, or have pairs agree an answer first so no one is exposed alone.
- Redirect: answer a question with "What do others think?" when the group can work it out.
Psychological safety
People learn less when they are afraid to look wrong. Amy Edmondson (1999) described psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In training, you build it by treating wrong answers as useful data ("Great, that's exactly the trap the matrix has"), admitting your own mistakes, and keeping practice low stakes. Avoid putting individuals on the spot in front of their manager.
Handling common situations
- One person dominates: "Thanks, let's hear from someone who hasn't spoken yet", or switch to pair or written responses.
- Silence: rephrase the question, give a minute to write first, or ask pairs to discuss.
- An expert challenges you: acknowledge it, ask them to share their experience, and if the point is valid, say so.
- Running late: cut content, not the debrief. The debrief is where learning is consolidated.
Common mistakes
- Unclear instructions, then repeating them group by group.
- Skipping the debrief because time ran out.
- Asking "Any questions?" and moving on after one second.
- Answering your own questions.
Quick recap
- Set up activities with purpose, task, output, groups, time and a check.
- Debrief every activity: What? So what? Now what?
- Use open questions and real wait time.
- Build psychological safety so people risk being wrong.
Try it
On the Do tab, run a short activity with a debrief for a small group.