Facilitator Guides

Adapting courses to the learning circle format

Facilitator guides are weekly agendas that facilitators can use to adapt online course materials to the learning circle format.

Here are some examples of facilitator guides that we love:

• 1619 Project by Ulonda and Hilary

• 21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge by Ulonda and Hilary

• American Sign Language (with flashcards + roleplaying activities!) by Deb

• Introduction to Public Speaking by P2PU

If you create a facilitator guide (no matter how simple or detailed!), you can share it back with the community by emailing it to [e-mail].

Read on to learn more about ways to use facilitator guides!

Adapting online courses

Many online courses are designed for individual study, and this material doesn't always fit neatly into a learning circle structure. Here are some ways you can use facilitator guides to adapt courses to a learning circle format:

• Add check-ins, group activities, and reflections to deepen learners' engagement with the course content

• Change the length of time devoted to covering a section of the course

  • Example: A free online course is structured into 4 weeks of 2-hour-long sessions, but your learning circle group can only meet for 60 minutes at a time. Use a facilitator guide to break up the content into 8 weeks of 60-minute-long sessions.

Take collective notes

Share an editable version of the guide with learning circle participants so that you can keep track of the knowledge that co-learners contribute. Some facilitators find that learners enjoy keeping records of particularly invigorating conversations between learners.

Keep track of questions

Facilitators are co-learners, not subject matter experts, and learners will often ask questions without a clear answer. Use the Reflection section of the facilitator guide to keep track of these questions, and check in at the beginning of sessions by asking learners to contribute the answers they found.

Save helpful resources

Over the course of the learning circle, learners will encounter videos, articles, books, and other resources to supplement their learning. Use the facilitator guide to save these resources for learners to find later.

Finding Facilitator Guides

You can search for all courses with facilitator guides on our Learning Resources page. For courses with facilitation guides, you can find the guide by visiting the "More Details" link.

Searching for learning resources with facilitator guides

Finding facilitator guides on course pages

Facilitator Guide Template

Facilitators are free to follow whatever process they like! You can create these with any tool you like, including Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, or P2PU’s hosted version of Etherpad.

P2PU follows this standard template when making new facilitator guides:

This template is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 and can be freely duplicated, modified, rearranged, or whatever else needed to plan a learning circle. You can make a copy of it here.