Activities are tools. Depending upon how they are used, well-facilitated activities can:

1.Promote Inclusion. Enables your clients to deal with their issues of “how do I fit in” and ‘Will I be accepted?” We all need to connect on a human level and answer these questions. Dealing with these issues removes a barrier to learning.

2.Address Multiple Intelligences. We’re all different. Using pedagogies other than lecture and small group discussion taps in to different forms of intelligence and allows more of your client group to learn in the way that they learn best.

3.Punctuate / Clarify Assessment Data. A carefully chosen activity – I’ve used Blind Polygon on several occasions – can provide a starting place for participants to meaningfully discuss what is working (or not), what is needed, etc. It can also punctuate assessment data concerning group dynamics that you’ve already collected and is especially helpful when the group is having difficulty accepting that “we really are this way.“

4.Reinforce Skills Training. An activity can be used to provide for fun practice or reinforcement in the interpersonal skills on which you’re training; alternately, it can provide the starting place for a skills session.

5.Validate Your Classroom Content. No one questions the data that they generate from their own experience. A carefully facilitated experience enables the group to access its own wisdom and insights (which means less work for you, too).

6.Provide Feedback to Participants. Activities give participants immediate feedback on their performance.

7.Enhance Transfer of Content Back to the Workplace. Activities are unique and memorable; participants tend to remember what they did and how they did it long after they leave the training.

8.Restore Energy. Activities get the blood flowing, away from the gluteus and back to the brain; that, and the positive emotions generated, creates resource states that promote better work. At a minimum, good activities can get you through the after-lunch “blahs.”

9.Add a Dose of Fun. People enjoy participating and trying new behaviors. How many of our programs would improve exponentially if we were able to inject a little more of the Fun into them?

10.Contribute to A Deeper Understanding of Your Own Training Content and Promote Your Own Professional Growth. In the process of preparing to facilitate activities and integrate them with your classroom content so that each sets up and reinforces the other, you will be gaining a deeper understanding of the dynamics involved in both the activity and in the group.

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