Facilitating sessions well is a skill that you will develop over time. It isn’t easy, and there will likely always be room for improvement. For that reason, it’s important to spend time every week reflecting on what went well and what might be improved next time - and then acting on those thoughts. Talking to other people about how best to run sessions can also be very helpful.
Luckily, even someone who hasn’t run any sessions before is very likely to be adding a lot of value if they are reliable, thoughtful and reflective. The rest of this section has some tips on how you might run sessions well.
The main thing to do to prepare for a session is to read the reading list. It’s not necessary to feel entirely resolved or be comfortable teaching the topic, but you should:
You should familiarise yourself with the Week-By-Week Guide and the key points for the topic. You will probably find it very helpful to have thought in advance about the directions you want to take the conversation and about potential rabbit holes you’d like to avoid spending too long on.
It will be useful to think back to how last week’s session went, and what you might try doing differently this time.
The key points for each topic will aid you when steering the discussions towards the main takeaways and back towards the appropriate content.
The suggested discussion questions aim to help participants understand the key points for each topic. Questions we think might be more important to discuss are in bold.
We also want participants to develop their toolkit for thinking about EA, as a facilitator you can help with this by modelling good epistemic norms and by pointing these out when they come up in discussion. We talk more about this below.
Of course, as well as participants learning about EA, we want people to enjoy the sessions and to feel safe, welcome and comfortable. These are just as important as the key points. When running sessions, you play a large role in making this happen.
By ‘culture’, we mean ‘the way we do things’. As the leader in the social context of the group, you have quite a lot of power to set the culture of the group, especially early in the sessions. Discussion norms to help set the group culture.
Here are a few norms that you might want to explicitly tell your participants you are aiming for (they will be given a copy of these norms), as well as implicitly by setting your example and what you accept: