Raise the Room: A Practical Guide to Participant-Centered Facilitation

$19.95 plus applicable taxes

In this hands-on book, author Eva Jo Meyers proposes that we shift from a talking-head model to a more inclusive model when we lead engagements, ensuring that everyone in the room has a voice and an opportunity to share their wisdom. Drawing on her career as a leader and professional facilitator, she describes the principles of Transformational Facilitation and how to apply them in real life. The goal: to help you create spaces in which every person feels motivated and can thrive as a fully included and indispensable member of the group.

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Description

Have you ever found yourself at the front of a room, calling on the same two hand-raisers, zipping through text-heavy slides, burdened with all of the information you are trying to cover — and wondered frantically why your audience seems so disengaged (and maybe even resentful)?

This approach to running meetings, workshops, and classes is extremely common, yet it’s largely ineffective because this one-way flow of information doesn’t inspire innovation, inclusivity, or buy-in.

Raise the Room reminds us: there’s a better way!

Author Eva Jo Meyers proposes that we shift from a talking-head model to a more inclusive model when we lead engagements, ensuring that everyone in the room has a voice and an opportunity to share their wisdom. Drawing on her career as a leader and professional facilitator, she describes the principles of Transformational Facilitation and how to apply them in real life. The goal: to help you create spaces in which every person feels motivated and can thrive as a fully included and indispensable member of the group.

The book is organized into five sections, each one providing actionable tips and tricks you can harness to breathe new life into your events:

  • Be Prepared: How to generate clear goals and objectives, schedule breaks, and create useful handouts
  • Create a Safer Environment: Ideas for setting a welcoming ambiance, creating a braver space for introductions, and building stronger teams
  • Transfer Power to the Participants: Strategies to help enforce equal airtime, access prior knowledge, and minimize lectures
  • Use Active Learning and Engagement Strategies: How to integrate art projects, videos, pair-shares, quotes, and research to stimulate deep thinking
  • Motivate Action: Ideas that enable participants to follow through on their plans through continued support, networking, and exit tickets

 

Whether you’re leading meetings, classes, workshops, or simply running the occasional small-group brainstorming session, you can immediately apply the practical tools in this book to create a more memorable and meaningful experience for everyone. Your participants will thank you — because rather than trying to lead the room, you’ll be empowering the room to lead.

Join the movement to Raise the Room and change the world — one engagement at a time.

 

Online reviews:

“This book could help the beginner or advanced presenter, facilitator or instructor. Whether used for a professional audience or for youth development practices, the principles discussed are universal. The book works with the research proven premise that participant-centered engagement yields powerful outcomes.
I manage youth development leaders and find the practical strategies and techniques to be aligned with the practices. “Raise the Room” is becoming one of my my “go-to” resources.” 

” If you facilitate meetings or lead professional training you NEED this book: I love this book! If you facilitate adult learners this book is a MUST have in your toolkit. I recommend this book to EVERYONE I know that holds space for adults. Eva Jo Meyers has done an exceptional job in creating an incredibly useful and accessible offering to the world of professional development.” 
“This is a down-to-earth, easy-to-read, wisdom-packed guide to facilitating in an engaging, equitable, respectful and memorable way. I wish conference speakers, my grad school professors, former supervisors etc had read this book!” 

“This Book Changed the Way I Think About Facilitation:While I think of myself as a strong facilitator, and have tried many of the practices in this book, Raise the Room really challenged the way I see myself in front of a group. Before reading the book, I often thought of facilitation as a type of performance, and believed that the success of a workshop, training, or meeting depended to a large part on my ability to hold and control a room, and on the quality and relevance of the information I had to share.

Eva presents a compelling case for another paradigm of facilitation, where the facilitator turns over as much power and responsibility as possible to the participants in the room. Many of the practices in the book show how to do just that, so even though making this mental shift was challenging, I felt supported with practical ideas to try.

The writing in the book is interesting throughout, and I found the examples helpful. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their ability to facilitate meetings or workshops, and especially to those who want to support greater equity in the room by challenging themselves to radically rethink their role as facilitators.”

“You will love this book!!!: When I read Raise the Room, I kept thinking of friends who I could buy it for: my friend who does trainings, another friend who leads workshops, my colleagues who run (a lot) of meetings- and the list goes on. This is for professional facilitators plus anyone who wants to engage an in-person group (which is most of us at some point). Tons of actionable tips for making engagements fun and inclusive. I love Eva’s passion- she’s so experienced and has tried so many angles. We get the benefits of all that testing. You can read Raise the Room cover to cover (totally enjoyable) or use as a reference for specific topics (totally useful). Highly recommend!” 

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