Facilitating Critical Conversations

ORG LP788 - Facilitating Critical Conversations

Credits: 3

This course is designed to better equip leaders in various settings (i.e., schools, corporate, non-profit, and community organizations) with the necessary tools and strategies for planning and facilitating effective discussions and interventions involving workplace culture, collaboration, and inclusion. Facilitating conversations across differences can be particularly complex when people are brought together to discuss some of the most challenging issues affecting teams and communities, such as fairness, equity, respect, and opportunity.

Many of the strategies that leaders employ in this space depend heavily on interpersonal awareness, conflict management skills, problem-solving abilities, dialogue facilitation, and other approaches that support constructive communication and shared understanding. Because effective facilitation requires practice, this course will be highly experiential and students will learn by doing.

Areas emphasized include planning and designing a facilitation process, creating a respectful and productive environment, communicating effectively, managing discussions, using structured exercises to encourage participation, and navigating group dynamics. By the end of this course, participants will have developed key facilitation skills that can be applied to a wide range of challenging conversations in professional and community settings.