Learning Circle Half-Day Training Agenda

We’ve recently updated our training agenda for new learning circle facilitators agenda which feature this forum and resources more prominently.

Here is the detailed facilitation agenda which can be run in 3 hours for 15-25 participants. Note that it is still a draft and I hope to get your feedback to make improvements.

Here are also the training slides that are meant to be used for this agenda, but they can certainly be adapted as you wish. Slides are not necessary when offering a learning circle training workshop but they do a good job at guiding everyone to the next activity.

Feedback so far:

  • The training workshop does a great job at modeling what exactly a learning circle is, without being so heavy handed in explaining it. It also works well for modeling the back and forth flow between group discussion and using an online course (our facilitator page and forum).
  • We featured two videos in the training: the basic intro What is a learning circle? and How is a facilitator different from a teacher?. We have a number of new videos on our youtube page that might also be useful to share. The videos helped people see that others were doing learning circles elsewhere and that it was an excellent way to hear other people in similar positions explain the learning circle model.
  • One challenge was making sure there was time allocated to supporting people to log in to the P2PU website. Without this login, they are not able to create a draft learning circle, add new courses or contribute to the forum. It is a bit tricky as some people may not have access to their work email during the training.

So, What do you think? What do you like? What could be changed? Share your own training resources and slides with the rest of us.

Moving forward, I would recommend we all tag any training issues on this forum as “training” to share ideas or resources.

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Thank you for posting, Nico!

This agenda worked very well in Tampa. We had the benefit of having Nico here, he was awesome to lead this training, but I was his “second” and now feel confident to use on my own (or with a co-worker, it’s nice to have two people lead). Staff were engaged, and feedback so far has been extremely positive. It was a great way to model Learning Circles to staff and get them on-board with the method. We are now following the training by holding four staff development learning circles over the next four weeks across our library system, on presentation skills and public speaking. If you can do so, I highly recommend taking this extended approach. There was some content we didn’t get to during the larger training (for example, collecting feedback) and additional questions that we’re able to work through with this extension, and it’s giving staff even more confidence to go through the model before using it with the public.

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Hey @Megan_Danak I believe you were going to do an evaluation with staff at a later date. Did anything interesting come back to share?