Learning and development (L&D) professionals are routinely tasked with facilitating trainings, retreats or strategy sessions — even if they’ve never been trained in the mechanics of facilitation itself.

In the absence of universalized, structured preparation, developing strong facilitation skills as an L&D professional is left up to chance and circumstance, meaning that learner engagement and Net Promoter Scores are just as variable.

Classroom teachers, by contrast, are trained and mentored in facilitation from day one, given that real-time facilitation is the constant context for classroom teaching. Skilled teachers develop a fluency in a set of techniques that are comprehensive and thematic, rather than topic- or industry-specific. This is why their techniques offer such valuable, transferable guidance for anyone leading learning in professional settings.

Let’s look at five essential techniques that comprise classroom teachers’ toolkit for facilitation.

5 Facilitation Techniques From Classroom Teaching

1. Condensing

“Condense” complex chunks of information into short, memorable phrases or one-liners, which makes new information more accessible and practical for learners. Doing so provides learners with a cognitive anchor to grasp the subject at hand. By condensing up front as well as at the end of individual slides or of larger sections, facilitators create conceptual bookends that help parse out phases of the learning experience.

Clear explanation matters in these moments more than precise explanation. For a differentiation between “clarity” and “precision,” take a look at the graphic below.

Notice how the “clear” graphic of a lily captures essential shape, form and visual information, which is then elaborated in its anatomically “precise” counterpart. Effective facilitators begin by establishing clarity around the content at hand, so that they can then expand into precision more successfully. Going the other way around unnecessarily invites confusion.

2. Checking for Understanding

Just like in self-guided learning, “checks for understanding” are crucial in instructor-led contexts for determining learners’ readiness levels and adjusting pace. Take the pulse of the room regularly, using visible, low-stakes formats (like “Fist to Five” polling) to assess the whole group quickly on how well content is landing — cultivating real-time insight for both the learner and the facilitator.

This needs to be more structured than asking “Does that make sense?” though it also needs to be more regular, responsive and impromptu then, say, a pre-planned Mentimeter slide.

3. Mirroring

To be a facilitative “mirror” is to reflect participants’ contributions back to them in clearer, more structured, or more elevated terms, thus reinforcing someone’s insight while guiding the whole group to find the utility in their contribution.

Mirroring converts participants’ interactions with each other and the facilitator into usable content for continued learning. By using sentence starters like “I hear you saying…”, “If I understand correctly…” and “What I’m taking away from that is…”, the facilitator allows for one-of-a-kind learning experiences that are uniquely co-constructed by the learners in that moment (rather than an unchanging, unresponsive learning experience that learners struggle to, well, “see themselves in”).

4. Deepening

“Deepening” means inviting learners to consider perspectives or dynamics they haven’t yet named, thus allowing for new dimensions of understanding. This act of asking follow-up questions is not meant to interrogate or shame the learner, but to surface new perspectives, stretch old thinking and consider underlying motives, emotions and values behind cognitive understanding.

Common sentence starters include “Have you ever considered…?” and “What would happen if…?” However, deepening questions are best when they are more tailored to the learners’ unique contribution. Thankfully, if the facilitator was already “mirroring” them beforehand, they are already equipped to follow-up with a highly aligned deepening question.

5. Constellating

To “constellate” is the most advanced of the five techniques—but also the most rewarding. It happens when a facilitator weaves together participants’ contributions into a new, synthesized and reflective form whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Facilitators constellate by threading themes between responses, or by lifting key phrases from earlier in the session and reintroducing them (and often recontextualizing them) in the current discussion.

The facilitator will often directly quote learners and treat those quotes as though they emerged from prevailing industry thought leaders, as well as put those quotes into conversation with each other. (Some teachers even keep a live note-taking system to jot down quotes and the names of learners who said them, knowing that they will likely refer to them later in the session.) This guides learners to “keep the thread” of learning from moment to moment, while turning the experience into one that is unforgettably synthesized, generative and affirming.

At the End of the Day, It’s About the Learners

Together, these five facilitation techniques from classroom teaching provide a sequential, holistic architecture for learners’ in-depth understanding and engagement over the length of a session. The facilitator clarifies a concept, assesses how lands, reflects learners’ thinking back to them, deepens that thinking, and finally connects it all to a larger picture that is uniquely co-constructed by the learners.

Important to note is that what makes these techniques impressively sophisticated in effect is also what makes them challenging to employ: a facilitator can reasonably predict — but never exactly script — how these strategies should manifest in a live session. They require facilitators to be responsive to learners’ unique insights and timely needs, which are never identical from group to group. Consequently, another way of thinking about effective facilitation is that it surrenders some facilitative control over to the learners: after all, this relational connectedness between facilitator and learner is what makes a co-constructed learning experience worth building.

This dynamic is reasonably intimidating; however, by taking on the challenge of incorporating these five learner-centered facilitation techniques, L&D professionals make instructor-led learning more collaborative, more memorable and more human. Like with any new skill, these techniques will likely feel awkward or unintuitive when first attempted, but committing to their integration will lead to more fruitful and goals-aligned experiences for facilitators and learners alike.