Facilitating Sessions

Effective Learning

Resources: Coaching participants

Exercises: Coaching participants

> “Coaching for development is about turning the focus from the issue to the person dealing with the issue, the person who’s managing the fire. This conversation is more rare and significantly more powerful.” (Michael Bungay Stanier)

Participants can be steered towards particularly impactful areas of work or improve their capacity to do so, given the right guidance. As facilitators, you are well-placed to guide participants towards making significant contributions to the field. 

By the end of the unit, you should be able to:

- Help participants to scope their projects
- Orient participant projects towards action
- Ask the right questions to guide participants


1. **Review the example project ideas for your course**
    1. **AI Alignment: **[example 1](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q5FrwLL8e35yJCZLEFM0ubBGHo4SdTfWbk8IxFNjeng/edit), [example 2](https://docs.google.com/document/d/12XxtirVSJ3agl3I0N1IqsEnfSmLM-axmjPAhl_AMH9U/edit)
    2. **AI Governance: **[examples here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/197qZyQ75SMDvWH3kuQoo6-JC9fyRsFbi_VzqygL5xsY/edit?usp=sharing)
    3. **Pandemics: **[example 1](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yokDMaTUvv7X7eYDO--vfFGAejwo-Oa5tTpBd1KYAsU/edit?usp=sharing), [example 2](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-FSc3aAOx_o17XMnjjndTOzEcTVJQ99-g7P75zTw7o/edit?usp=sharing)
    4. Note: These are ideas were submitted by participants, please don't share further 
2. **Evaluate the projects **from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) based on how well they exhibit the following:
    1. **Clearly and specifically scoped**: The project has a clear question, hypothesis or measurable goal
    2. **Attempt at novelty**: This doesn’t need to be a groundbreaking novel research paper. It could be an explainer of a concept that’s more clearly written or illustrated than anything that already exists.
    3. **Relevant to the course**
        1. **AI Alignment: **The project relates to decreasing the expected harm (i.e. focuses on improving things) from highly capable and broad AI systems (as opposed to less capable or narrow systems).
        2. **AI Governance: **The project relates to policy or technical strategies to minimize risks or increase the benefits of AI systems, focusing on governance interventions.
        3. **Pandemics: **Clearly related to core biosecurity concerns: addressing the challenges involved in preventing, detecting, or mitigating high-consequence biological threats.
    4. **Suggest improvements** to the projects.


Facilitator Training

Exercises: Coaching participants

Exercises