Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

Steve Kaliski

Listening to Validate: A Small but Critical Facilitation Move

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listeningBy Steve Kaliski, DCI Fellow

Teachers probably recognize the moment: you’re leading class discussion on a particularly ripe or personal topic. You’ve asked your students to abide by some system of mutual respect as they tiptoe into sharing vulnerable, fraught insight. Now, the floor is open, and one by one, the group is starting to participate. You must guide the ensemble from one speaker to the next, inserting yourself where necessary but basically staying out of the way. You’re here to listen. 

The topic itself has your heart racing a bit, too. How will you bookend the conversation with commentary that exudes expertise yet humility? How will you make sure you don’t slip up and say the wrong thing? Who raised their hand first? Do you have enough time to go over the next assignment in the last five minutes of class? Do you have scallions for the stir fry tonight? Do you need to swing by Teeter after work? Do the Hornets still have a shot at the sixth seed?

Disparate thoughts race around, and you give yourself permission to chase these thoughts because, after all, this conversation is not about you. You’re just here to listen.

But then the tricky moment happens. A student finishes a comment, and you snap out of your thought spiral to sense that this comment packed a particular punch. You need to validate it somehow. This student needs to feel appreciated. But as you were off wondering about whether tomorrow’s reading was behind a paywall or not, you forgot to do the one thing you were here to do. You forgot to listen.

So how do you respond? Let’s say Jessica just spoke.

JESSICA: …and yeah, that’s pretty much why my family is passionate about this.

(pause)

YOU: Thanks, Jessica. Anyone want to go next?

This might seem like a perfectly fine response for a discussion facilitator, and oftentimes, it works well enough, or at least it does no harm. However, as I’ve learned during my time facilitating D Teams this year, in moments of “daring sharing,” your participants need a bit more from you than “thanks, next.” And if your attention has wandered under the false assumption that listening is inherently passive and thus less work (it happens to all of us!), you might need to close the excess tabs in your brain and really focus on the people in the room with you.

What would be a good response here, one that’s validating but does not center you over your conversation participants (in this context, they are your students, but they might also be your staff, your family, or your team)? The key is to make sure your speaker feels heard. This is especially vital on Zoom, where the normal approving signals of body language are difficult to perceive.

But it’s hard to make someone feel heard while you as the facilitator want to remain de-centered.

I try to listen for the “one thing” that I can repeat or rephrase back to the speaker as a signal of my connection to their words. If Jessica spoke at length about her family’s involvement in the topic, and at some point she mentioned a “love of the outdoors” as a major part of that, the dialogue might now be:

JESSICA: …and yeah, that’s pretty much why my family is passionate about this.

YOU: Thanks, Jessica. Yes, that makes a lot of sense, especially the huge importance of the outdoors. Yeah. That connects. (introspective pause) Thanks again. Anyone want to go next? Or maybe build off of what Jessica said?

It’s not an earth-shattering facilitation move, but it’s important. Listen closely, and echo something, anything. Your participants will feel like they’ve said something that landed, that they’ve added to the discourse. 

These are particular tools of the weaver approach to facilitation. I speak more about different approaches to facilitation and some tips for facilitators in the demo video I created for the Verna Miller Case Symposium. Feel free to watch it here: https://deliberativecitizenship.org/demonstration-of-facilitation-styles/.

On Mistakes

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picture of a theatre stage with empty chairs

By Steve Kaliski, DCI Fellow

Theatre is a laboratory of risks, mistakes, and accidents.

Though this might sound like a strange way to describe an art form that, at least from the audience’s point of view, depends on meticulously repeating the exact same product night after night, risks, mistakes and accidents really point to what is indispensable about theatre in both civic and academic contexts. 

Consider the hyper-competitive, high-achieving ethos of a place like Davidson College. Extremely smart people work very, very hard to be as utterly on point as often as possible. But how about this, students? Take a class in Cunningham, and you can let down your perfectionist guards! Here, we don’t want you to do it the right way, at least not for a while. We want you to mess up, to fail, to test all the wrong ways first. We want you to explore the edges of the cliffside, not stand stock still in the middle of a vast field, wrongfully assuming that you’re already about to fall.

That’s all pretty romantic. What does it actually mean? And how does it connect to deliberation?

I teach theatre at Davidson and am also an actor, director, playwright, and public speaking coach. All of these roles feature moments of crisis in which I have to make a choice about which of two lists to center: the list of things I can’t do, or the list of things I can do. 

The list of things I can’t do is vast: I can’t say “like” or “um;” I can’t look awkward with my arms; I can’t say “I don’t know” (I’m an expert, after all); I can’t look like an idiot on stage; I can’t forget my lines; I can’t bore my audience.

But the list of things I can do is vaster: my voice is an instrument, and I can do anything with it (speed up, slow down, take pauses, chuckle, make funny noises, emphasize the delicious phrase that brings it all together); I can make my scene partner see how much I care (amazing how I’m not thinking about my hands anymore); I can speak with passion about a topic that has affected me personally; I can ask questions to which I truly don’t know the answers.

Much of performance training empowers the artist with a sense of what can be done. This is tremendously freeing, and it can lead to many happy, productive accidents. In a scene between a mother and daughter, the daughter might decide she wants to get her mother to listen to her. Her tactic is “to bounce off the walls.” The actor decides to literally try this, playing the whole scene as a sprint from one studio wall to another, with an emphatic bounce at each point of impact. She even says “boing” out loud.

Is this the right choice for the final performance? No. It’s ridiculous.

But in being willing to explore anything, perhaps the actor discovers that 10% of this is, believe it or not, useful. And that 10% makes it into opening night. The clumsy stuff unmasked the real stuff.

Reflecting on our early semester deliberations, I am struck by the fear and caution that stifles our discourse about major civic issues. “I don’t know a thing about healthcare policy, so I won’t say anything, or I’ll politely defer to the consensus.” This feels like a distinctly Davidsonian pressure to be right, to be a premature expert, to not say the wrong thing, although I suspect it affects others elsewhere as well. I hope as we all rehearse our deliberative encounters that we can learn from the theatre and be more open to risks, mistakes, and accidents. If we center the positive–what we can do, what we can ask–we might messily make our way toward some productive civic action.

P.S. The only times I’ve ever forgotten my lines were when I told myself I couldn’t forget my lines.