By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku
2. Robert Hacku (biography)
What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?
A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.
We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.
Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.