INTRODUCTION: Permaculture Workshops 35Pay attention to feedback from the participants and adjust what you are doing accordingly.
You can gauge the effectiveness of each session based on ongoing participant feedback,
interest, and enthusiasm.
- How many questions are asked?
- Do people look alert and attentive or bored and restless?
- Ask participants questions to check whether they are following you.
As noted in the section on creating a lesson plan, it is important to be clear about
exactly what you aim to achieve before you start teaching. That being said, a lot of
unexpected things will happen while you are teaching – you can never predict exactly
how the participants will respond to a lesson. The most important thing is to teach
the learners, not the lesson plan! Allow yourself to respond to participants’ feedback,
adapt, sometimes even abandon your plans as you go, in order to reach your objective
through different means than you expected.
If you see that the participants are getting restless or tired, take a stretch break, run a
short energizer exercise, or shift to a different activity. Adjust the length and order of
activities in the plan as needed to ensure that the participants stay interested and don’t
get bogged down and unable to retain what you teach.
Give participants lots of positive feedback when they do things well.
Stimulate and support your own learning. As a facilitator you too are a learner. In fact, if
you are not learning anything, chances are the participants are not learning much either.
If you are curious, alert, open to new ideas, and enjoying their company, they are more
likely to feel the same way.
Be especially curious to find out what works best. Allow yourself to experiment, and
even make mistakes – mistakes have been the source of some of the world’s greatest
inventions! When you teach something, you can learn something new about how to do
it even better. By observing participants’ responses to the various Modules of the course
you will learn what is most, or least, relevant. You are strongly encouraged to develop
new additions and variations to the material in this handbook on an ongoing basis.
At the end of each session or day of the course, take a few moments to make a “self-
assessment” – you can use the box at the bottom of the lesson plan to note how well
each session was received and jot down any ideas you have about how to make it better
next time. Do this as soon a possible, while the details are still fresh in your memory.