Community Media/CCMW/Facilitation approach

Main Format Used in this Workshop

There were six (6) main formats used in this workshop:

1. Circles brought everyone together as a group, especially at the start and end of each day; we used circles for introductions, checking-in with people, housekeeping announcements, Q&A, and sharing short, closed-ended ideas and experiences.
2. Rapid fire presentations: individual participants all did brief presentations about their organisation and work; they were asked prepared in advance but without slide presentations.
3. Spectrogram: an active exercise that requires participants to literally take a stand on an issue, framed in a statement, e.g. on the first morning our statement was "The classroom is a better educational environment than a radio programme"; participants placed themselves physically on a spectrum of opinion, from full agreement to disagreement and then explained their perspectives and tried to influence others to shift their own positions.
4. Small group work: breakouts were used to get people working together in small teams, discussing ideas and produce plans/materials on their chosen area; we had two streams of group work, one developing the basis for learning programmes on Parenting, Violence, Farming Livelihoods and HIV/AIDS and the other on key areas of interest/concern for community and public media in the region, Technical issues, Financial Sustainability, Human Resources, and Impact Evaluation.
5. Marketplace is an active format in which a set number of participants "pitch" specific ideas from "stalls"; other participants rotate through the different presentations in the "marketplace"; the advantages of the format are that presentations are done face-to-face in small groups; over the course of 30-45 minutes, participants are exposed to four different ideas.
6. Clinic: a format used to match needs to resource persons; individuals identified problem areas using post-it notes, which the facilitators then clustered them to reveal priorities and identified good resource people to lead small group sessions.

For a complete, updated list, please see: Facilitation Formats & Tools