For Facilitators

For facilitators

Using the SHE4Health material as a facilitator

If you are a school consultant that assists schools in their innovation process, you can use the material on this learning platform as inspiration to your facilitation process. You can use the material to plan training activities, co-creation workshops and implementation processes.

Concretely you have access to:

- - A set of concrete training materials that you can use to introduce schools to the concept of school health promotion, the health promoting school concept and the overall understanding of the broad concept of health and health equality.
- - The Health Promoting School Guide, that is a short and process oriented guide that you can use as inspiration together with the schools to plan the development and implementation process
- - The Health Promotion School Checklists that you can use together with the schools to set up goals and monitor the development process
  - The good practice catalogue, where you can find inspiration from other schools around Europe that have worked concretely with school health promotion.
- - A set of policy and implementation recommendations that are based on the general results from the SHE4AHA project. As a facilitator you can especially use the ones that focus on school level and the collaboration with school authorities.

You are welcome to use all the materials on the platform, you should just remember to credit the SHE4AHA project, as all the materials are protected under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.

What is a facilitator?

A facilitator should be seen as a person, or persons, who participate(s) in strategic and / or change processes with the objective to ease the process. A neutral person or persons, who manage(s) the flow of discussions and dialogues encouraging all participants to participate in the best possible and equal way and stay on the task, increasing the collective value of the entire team. 6 important steps of the role of a facilitator can be described as follows;

1) Preparing and planning the process activity agenda in advance

Prepare the work in advance taking into account the “who”, “what”, “why” and “where”, to decide “how” to carry out the meeting.

2) Clarifying the objectives of each process activity, as well as the expected time that will be spent on each activity

Making sure that all participants understand and agree upon the objective of the activity.

3) Co-creating community rules to establish appropriate ways to interact with each other during the process activity

What is allowed and what is not allowed within the collaboration.

4) Keeping the discussion moving

Making sure that all participants are heard and participate in the discussion

5) Monitoring the time of the process activity

Making sure that the activities and discussions have a time limit; not too long and not too short. Momentum should be kept at the same time as the group needs time to get around the subject.

6) Close the process activity and renew the action items for the future

Summing up the meeting and make sure that all participants understand and recognise the outcome of the meeting or activity.

Why is it a good idea to engage an external facilitator when working with the health promoting school concept?

Based on the gathered knowledge and evaluations from the pilot projects that were carried through in the SHE4AHA project, a general experience is that results are better, when an external facilitator is connected to a strategic change and implementation process. The reasons for this are manyfold, and among others;

1) A school manager is part of the school culture and risks either not see the critical factors or have difficulties to mobilize change because of the hierarchy or biased understandings from both the management side and stakeholder side.

2) If a staff member, or a group of staff members, are appointed facilitators, he / she / they risk(s) to be caught between two “camps” and a risk for creating internal “policy battles” is there.

3) An external facilitator is not part of the culture and will be able to see things from the “outside” without a biased understanding.

4) An external facilitator will be able to ask the difficult questions without prejudice.

5) Available time to make comprehensive follow-up on decisions and agreed actions is extremely important, and teachers or other staff members will very often not have this time available. Their primary job will normally be to provide teaching, and facilitation will be an additional task, hence the application of the health promoting school approach risks losing the momentum, if follow up does not take place in an effective way.

6) As a school manager it is easier to describe a concrete task to a contracted and external facilitator, keeping that person responsible for the process as described in a contract.

7) And perhaps most important of all: By using an external facilitator, school management is exempt from obligations as being responsible for the process, enabling school management to focus on the end product, namely to implement health promoting practices in the school environment. In other words, this construction and distribution of responsibility with an external facilitator creates ‘free space” for school management to engage in the process.

If a school decides not to engage an external facilitator to assist the change and implementation process, we strongly advise designating an internal coordinator for the task, providing this person sufficient time, resources and authority to complete the process. Still, it will be most helpful and relevant for this person to collaborate with an external school consultant or facilitator.