On Saturday, September 9, the newly trained coaches from this summer's cohort gathered at the U of H Hilton for our first on-going training session. This is a departure from support events that we've held in years past. Instead of hosting stand alone clinics, we are treating the new coaches like their own CFG and trying to build ongoing relationships and model CFG practices throughout the year.

During breakfast, the participants and facilitators responded to this Chalk Talk question: What have you done to start a group?
Obed volunteered to facilitate Connections and we did a new icebreaker called "Finding Commonalities." All the winners got a book, compliments of the Houston A+ Challenge, for their own professional libraries.

We then got to the "meat" of the day. The four facilitators had picked 4 different articles or sets of articles and 4 different protocols to use. The participants could pick the article that most appealed to them.
Mary facilitated a discussion of "Through the Lens of a Critical Friend" by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick. Using the "Marvin's Model" protocol Donna's group discussed a series of personal essays by John Pieper: "Into the Light--Reflections from a New Coach," "Apples and CFGs in Harmony: A 'Core' Curriculum," and "Serendipity." Michaelann's group read "Seventeen Reasons Why Football Is Better Than High School" by Herb Childress, and Carolyn's group read "Taking Time to Tend to the 'Good'" by Betty Bisplinghoff. Of course, each group learned something different, and I learned that people really appreciate choices.

A new CFG for experienced facilitators and coaches met for the first time today. For our opening teambuilder, we did a making metaphor activity. We each completed the sentence "When I am my best as a facilitator, I am like a _____________," drew a picture, and reflected about the strengths and shadows of that image. We then shared with the people at our table and helped each other delve deeper to find more strengths and shadows.

I wrote that when I am my best as a facilitator, I am like a great actress. The strengths that my group and I came up with were that a great actress can be engaging and elicit strong emotions and reactions. She can maintain focus and keep others grounded. She knows where she is going, and that can give others a sense of comfort.

On the other hand, an actress may be too much the center of attention. Participants may feel like a passive audience instead of fellow actors. Most tellingly for me, an actress must follow a script.

Even though "actress" was the first word that popped in my head, I fought against it for a while and tried to think of a "better" metaphor before I resigned myself to working with the image and seeing where it would take me. Like my imaginary actress, I felt confident, comfortable, and secure during the metaphor and text-rendering activities. I saw people engaged in the learning and making great connections. We were focused. But as the evening went on, I found some painful truths in this metaphor. When the group's discussion wandered from my own vision of the agenda, my confidence dissolved. Without the script of a well-planned agenda, I felt paralyzed. I was unable to quickly improvise and change the "script" to facilitate the group's decision-making. I also felt somewhat "blinded by the stagelights"--I could no longer discern individual faces and needs.

This experience helped me see that I need more skill and practice with different decision-making modes. The Facilitator's Fieldbook lists these decision modes:

Absolute Consensus (All must agree to support a decision.)
Modified Consensus (All must be willing to support or "live with" decisions.)
Consultative (Leader decides following consultation with group.)
Consultative Consensus (Leader consults with group, seeks consensus, and then makes decision.) and
Voting (By ______ vote; specify majority, two-thirds, etc.)

We had to decide when the next meeting would be. In hindsight, I think I was going for "Consultative Consensus," but I didn't know that, and I certainly did not communicate it to the group. So who gets to decide, and who gets to decide who gets to decide?

Tonight's experience also pointed out my ambivalence about leadership. I want to BE an effective leader, yet I shy away from difficult decisions. I want to hear and value everyone's voice, yet I ignore some voices in the interest of "just getting the decision over with."

Finally, I've been thinking that maybe I should pursue this metaphor and improve my facilitation by learning more about the art of acting. Interestingly, Leisure Learning offers a class called "Bite the Bug--Beginning Acting," and the course description includes this sentence: These techniques will allow you to be more of who you are in life and on stage. Aaah. . .there's that "BE" word again.

A new CFG for experienced coaches and/or facilitators convened for the first time on October 25 at Grady Middle School. Present were Donna, Mike, Natalie, Michaelann, Carolyn, Alejandro, Brandi, Debbie, Angela, Marcela, Lynn, Alfred, Tim, Linda, Lydia, Lauren, Linn, and Beth.

After a simple welcome and Connections, we did an exercise called "Creating Metaphors" from Parker Palmer's book The Courage to Teach. Everyone took a blank 4x6 card and completed the sentence "When I am my best as a facilitator (or coach), I am like a _____." On the back of the card, we wrote down the strengths and "shadows" of the metaphor. We shared our metaphors with the others at our table and helped each other deepen our understanding of the metaphor by adding strengths and shadows. Then we gathered in a circle and introduced ourselves with our name, metaphor, and what that metaphor reveals about coaching or facilitating. For example, one participant said that she is like a sponge because she can "soak it in and squirt it back." Another mentioned that she is like a maneuverable sports car. My personal reflections about my metaphor are in the entry "Facilitating in the Shadows". Click on the thumbnail photo to read a list of all our metaphors.

Next, we read an excerpt from Robert Hargrove's Masterful Coaching titled "It's Who You Are Being, Not Just Technique." We used the Text Rendering Protocol to interact with the text and then we compared the words and phrases that emerged in the Text Rendering Protocol with the qualities of strong facilitators that emerged in the Making Metaphors activity. The group made some strong connections that will inform our work throughout the coming year. Click on the thumbnail picture to see our lists.

Next, Tim shared some background information about why our new CFG was formed and what we hope to accomplish. We hope that the Facilitators' CFG can be a vehicle for building leadership capacity for professional learning communities in Houston. We want to nurture a cohort of skilled facilitators for local events, and we hope to build bridges across schools and districts.

Finally, we decided on meeting times for the rest of 2006 and wrote reflections. All reflections are in the extended entry.