Facilitation Trainings

I have worked and held space as a group facilitator since I was in my early twenties — facilitating group learning, decision-making, and difficult conversations. In my experience, having a skilled facilitator can make or break a project or a process, but so few people have had formal training in how to occupy this role.

In my experience, a facilitator’s role is…

To ask: what is needed? Both in advance, and in the moment. To make a plan based on what you think might be needed, based on the information that is available to you. And also: to adapt your plan in the moment when you sense that something you didn’t expect may be needed.
To ask: what is going on? Sometimes out loud, and sometimes in your head. Are people tired? Are they mad at each other? Are they feeling discouraged? Did you offend them by accident? Is there something unexpressed that needs expressing? Is there something happening that needs to stop? And then: to plan for and respond to what you think may be needed based on your assessment of what’s going on. And then: to do your best to take a second, and third, and fourth look at what you think is going on, knowing that your own biases, and personal limitations in perspective, and occasional lack of context will sometime cause you to miss or misinterpret certain things.

To earn and keep trust. When you ask people to follow along with a plan that you’ve made, and to lend you a certain power and authority as a facilitator, you are asking people to trust you. To trust that you’re being thoughtful and considerate, and to hope that you have a trustworthy perspective on what is what’s needed and what’s going on. You are asking them to just “go with me on this”. When you facilitate a group as an outsider, you need to work extra hard to show people that they can trust you, to earn their trust. But, facilitating a group as an insider has its own set of challenges. If you know me very well, and you know me to be an untrustworthy person from your past experiences, and I ask you to “just go with me on this”, will you really? Probably not. Trust is one of the most essential things.
To trust people. While it is important to plan, it is equally important to let natural processes unfold. Sometimes we don’t always know in advance what will be important. Sometimes we don’t always know what people are capable of. Sometimes you need to throw away your plans, even if just for a moment, and let humans be human together.

To pay careful attention. In general, but in particular to power dynamics in a space. It’s your job to do what you can to create equitable power relations between a group of people, even for just an hour or two. This is about power in the sense of “systemic power”, like along race, class, gender lines etc. But it’s also about informal forms of power, like: who is popular? Whose voice seems to be respected? Who has access to the most information or organizational history? And so on.
To make space for complexity. To facilitate in a way that treats difference as a starting point and as a gift, rather than as an afterthought and a burden. When I teach my students how to craft a good research interview question, I tell them that their goal should be to articulate their question in such a way that somebody could answer it in literally any way that is true. I think we can think about facilitation in the same way. adrienne maree brown says, “There’s a conversation in every room that only the people present can have”, and that it’s our job as facilitators to find it. We can only really do that if we learn to love the fact of difference, the fact of particularity, and not be scared of it.

Invite me to teach your group about anti-oppressive facilitation.

Very few people have been trained to facilitate, and even fewer people have been taught to facilitate projects and processes from an anti-oppressive perspective. An anti-oppressive facilitation practice acknowledges that one-size-fits-all approaches to facilitation usually only benefit those whose minds, bodies, and identities are normalized in our society. But if there are as many needs as there are people, is it even possible to ‘get it right’? I can help guide your group in how to value participant complexity, with a particular focus on neurodiversity, in their facilitation practice. We can do that through:

Lunch and learn seminars with Q&A.
More active, participatory workshops exploring key principles in facilitating toward participant complexity.
Tailored workshops focusing on facilitation-related topics that you’ve identified as areas for growth on your team.
1-on-1 or small group coaching centred around cultivating a more grounded, true-to-you, anti-oppressive leadership style as a facilitator.

Interested? Please reach out!

Here’s what some people had to say about training with me:

We recently had our team attend Remy Klein’s workshop on “Teaching and Facilitating with Neurodiversity in Mind. ” The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and everyone who attended highlighted several key points:

Many noted their appreciation for how Remy took a complex and nuanced topic and made it feel accessible and actionable, specifically for working with job seekers with disabilities.

They didn’t just present information; they provided a clear roadmap for implementing these ideas in our daily work.

The session created a safe and engaging environment where everyone felt comfortable asking questions and sharing their experiences, making the learning informative, deeply personal, and resonant.

Speaking for myself, I would highly recommend Remy Klein as your organization’s next facilitator/workshop provider. From the beginning, Remy made sure the workshop was tailored to our specific needs at CCRW, taking the time to ensure the content and activities reflected our work. Thanks again, Remy! 🙂

– Julianna Cougle, eLearning and Curriculum Developer from the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation & Work

When Remy came to our class and ran the facilitation workshop, it was the first time I realized I love facilitating! I had not thought deeply about facilitation before, and the way Remy approached our workshop and shared their knowledge on facilitation was inspiring. I appreciated the idea of complexity, how it is a wondrous part of life, and not an obstacle to dread or run away from. Remy described people’s complexity as creating a solar system and this I noted as a beautiful outlook on life in general.

– Student in the Masters of Community Psychology program at Wilfrid Laurier University