Raise the Room: A practical guide to participant-centered facilitation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781949298093)

Have you ever found yourself at the front of a room, calling on the same two hand-raisers, zipping through text-heavy slides, burdened with all of the information you are trying to cover -- and wondered frantically why your audience seems so disengaged (and maybe even resentful)?

This approach to running meetings, workshops, and classes is extremely common, yet it's largely ineffective because this one-way flow of information doesn't inspire innovation, inclusivity, or buy-in.

Raise the Room reminds us: there's a better way

Author Eva Jo Meyers proposes that we shift from a talking-head model to a more inclusive model when we lead engagements, ensuring that everyone in the room has a voice and an opportunity to share their wisdom. Drawing on her career as a leader and professional facilitator, she describes the principles of Transformational Facilitation and how to apply them in real life. The goal: to help you create spaces in which every person feels motivated and can thrive as a fully included and indispensable member of the group.

The book is organized into five sections, each one providing actionable tips and tricks you can harness to breathe new life into your events:

• Be Prepared: How to generate clear goals and objectives, schedule breaks, and create useful handouts

• Create a Safer Environment: Ideas for setting a welcoming ambiance, creating a braver space for introductions, and building stronger teams

• Transfer Power to the Participants: Strategies to help enforce equal airtime, access prior knowledge, and minimize lectures

• Use Active Learning and Engagement Strategies: How to integrate art projects, videos, pair-shares, quotes, and research to stimulate deep thinking

• Motivate Action: Ideas that enable participants to follow through on their plans through continued support, networking, and exit tickets

Whether you're leading meetings, classes, workshops, or simply running the occasional small-group brainstorming session, you can immediately apply the practical tools in this book to create a more memorable and meaningful experience for everyone. Your participants will thank you -- because rather than trying to lead the room, you'll be empowering the room to lead.

Join the movement to Raise the Room and change the world -- one engagement at a time.