Strategies to Support Co-Facilitation in Classroom Sessions
SIMR Practice Brief, OPRE Report #2023-007
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Associated Project
Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation
Clients
Key Findings
This brief shares four tips to support Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programs:
- Lay out expectations in advance. The brief shares strategies and tools for co-facilitators to get to know one another, their preferences, and their facilitation styles before teaching together and to plan lessons and debrief before and after every workshop session. It also includes a tool for co-facilitation teams to set expectations for behavior management with classroom teachers before the start of HMRE programming.
- Adopt a cohesive approach to co-facilitation through training and ongoing team check-ins. Training can help co-facilitators develop a common understanding and approach for how to function as part of a co-facilitation pair, such as normalizing constructive feedback. Regular team meetings offer a chance for teams to participate in group problem-solving. The brief includes a tool for structuring regular team meetings.
- Develop processes to support and encourage intentionality. Adopting new co-facilitation practices requires practicing them with regularity and intention. Youth & Family Services (YFS) co-facilitators set goals for implementing specific co-facilitation strategies and followed up with one another in group meetings. This helped co-facilitators keep the strategies in the front of their minds as they planned workshops together and pay attention to how students reacted to them when they practiced them in the workshop. Grant recipients can use the planning and team meeting tools to support the intentional practice of co-facilitation strategies.
- Engage youth as partners in shaping a strong co-facilitation approach. YFS co-facilitators distributed regular feedback forms to youth to get direct insights from youth about what they did and did not like about workshop sessions and their overall satisfaction and engagement level. This helped co-facilitators adjust their approach for different settings and different groups of youth. The brief links readers to sample “exit tickets,” or feedback forms, that they can customize and use on their own.
The co-facilitation tips and tools in this brief are drawn from work conducted with Youth & Family Services (YFS) in the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Services (SIMR) study. YFS is an HMRE grant recipient funded by the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and based in Rapid City, South Dakota. They build on earlier rapid cycle learning work conducted in another federally sponsored study, Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS), to develop a youth facilitation curriculum.
In SIMR, YFS participated in rapid cycle learning to enhance its approach to co-facilitating Relationship Smarts Plus 4.0 workshops in both rural and urban high schools in western South Dakota. The SIMR project has two related goals: (1) to improve the service delivery of grantees in the study and (2) to develop lessons from the broader HMRE field about promising practices for addressing common implementation challenges, including challenges related to recruitment, retention, and content engagement.
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