Reflections on Structures for Effective Facilitation

I chose these two structures as they were used effectively in my meetings:

Statistics (Summarizing and Synthesizing)
Surveys and Statistics is the process of getting data and then convert it into meaningful
numbers of occurrences, to enable informed decision making; data collection and conversion
into meaningful descriptive qualitative and quantitative summaries validates peoples opinions
and ideas, and enables proper interpretations while providing an accurate idea about trends
and distribution of opinions.
While in the process of defining the specific orientation for the project, my team decided to
survey teachers in order to better understand their perception on the existing teachers
evaluation system, and identify potential problems in the system as perceived by the teachers.
The team first designed the survey, then posted it online to all teachers, and afterwards
analysed the findings using statistics google docs is an excellent tool to convert survey data
into statistics; and hence, the surveys findings were then analysed by the team and became
the basis of their decisions and action plan.
I believe that surveys and statistics can be used in many operations at school; converting
grades into statistics for examples, or surveying parents for a specific topic to enable
teachers and administrators to make informed decisions.

Research and Presentation (Generating ideas)
This is a structure that consists of asking participants to undertake a research at the end of
the meeting, as an assignment for the coming meeting; it has the advantage of getting
members to actually get ready for the coming meeting topic, while providing them with
valuable information about the topic, other than theirs. In addition, it gets the members into
the habit of becoming informed decision makers as while they are researching they are
gathering necessary information to get ready to discuss the findings.
In the next meeting, members then share their findings with the rest of the team; this again
is another opportunity for all the team to gain more information about a topic, consider
different angles and practices, and not only be narrow-mindedly focuses on one perspective
only.

Another use of this structure is with students; using it with teachers in departments and PLCs
is an opportunity for teachers to experience their students workload and assigned tasks, to
better understand the difficulties that students sometimes face.