How Can Facilitation Transform Professional Learning in Education?

A conversation with Susan Wilson-Golab, Administrator at Bloomfield Hills Schools

“I allow myself to be very vulnerable and open because I know I’ll grow in it, but I also know it helps others step into being vulnerable alongside me.”- Susan Wilson-Golab

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas Ferguson converses with Susan Wilson-Golab about her evolution from a K-12 district administrator to an expert in educational leadership and facilitation. Susan delves into her career progression, the significance of adapting to different organizational cultures, and the patience needed for effective change facilitation. Her reflections offer valuable insights into the world of professional learning and the art of facilitation.

Show Highlights

[00:02:28] Early experience with facilitation

[00:08:59] Transition to facilitation

[00:16:10] Patience in facilitation

[00:23:13] Navigating a Career Transition

[00:26:23] Growth Through Vulnerability

[00:29:00] Embracing Vulnerability for Growth

[00:36:50] Future Horizons and Challenges

Links | Resources

Susan on Linkedin

About the Guest

Prior to receiving her doctorate in Educational Leadership, Susan spent twenty plus years leading adult professional learning. Her professional adventures have included high school English teacher, teacher leadership, Director of the Oakland Writing Project, regional literacy consultant, and K12 district administrator. She has co-authored multiple educational journal articles focused on the teaching of writing.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today, I’m with Susan Wilson-Golab. Prior to receiving her doctorate, educational leadership, Susan spent 20 plus years leading adult professional learning. Her professional adventures have included high school English teacher, teacher leadership, director of the Oakland writing project, regional literacy consultant, and K-12 district administrator. She has also co-authored multiple educational journal articles focused on the teaching of writing. Welcome to the show, Susan.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so great to have you. It’s been a moment since the summit and it was such a pleasure having you here in Austin and leading us through an amazing workshop that was based off of your PhD.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Yeah, I spent months actually wringing my hands over it, because I was going to be working with a different audience than I usually had, and then I realized you really deep-parlay your facilitation. Learning whether you’re in an education-based audience or an industry-based audience, it all transfers.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s dial back a moment In my typical tradition, we’ll start off hearing a little bit about how you got your start, or specifically, what was a pivotal moment for you where you realized facilitation was a thing or you were drawn to it, or you just experienced the power of facilitation? What’s one of those early stories that comes to mind?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Well, I think people would say, “Well, you’re a teacher. Isn’t that what you do on a daily basis?” But really as teachers, especially young teachers, you think about that you’re just the content expert, you’re not really thinking of yourself as a facilitator. So it wasn’t until I landed into a wonderful learning community within a English department in my first job where our department chair would facilitate professional learning with us. And I didn’t know at the time that’s really what I was experiencing, all I knew is I couldn’t get enough of it. We would usually start sometimes very early in the morning before teaching or we would stay hours after school. But I loved the community of it. I loved the constant stretch of the learning. And when she was going to step down from department chair and she was retiring, for a moment I kept looking around the room saying, “Okay. Well, who’s going to step in because we need this experience. We need to continue this community.”

And I realized, “Well, Susan, you might have to step in.” So I always say I’m a reluctant to lead facilitator. People who knew me long ago would’ve said Susan’s a very quiet person. I love to read a room, sit quietly and really watch. And I think I’d been working all my time up to that point where I had that epiphany moment where, “Maybe I have to step up, maybe I have to step up and build that community within the place I’m working with other people.” So I’d say that was very early on, about five to six years into my teaching career. That really opened up for me. I wouldn’t know at the time that I would’ve said I was facilitating. I think I would’ve been saying I was hosting, I was creating a place, a community, and I think I really came into understanding facilitation when I got involved with the National Writing Project. And our local affiliate site was the Oakland Writing Project.

And I started facilitating our four-week summer institutes with a team of two other teachers who were very seasoned and veteran at facilitating. And I was at that point looking for what’s the script, tell me how I do this. And so I really had to learn by doing with the experience in the summer institute. So that would really be where I really turned a corner on facilitation, and that’s where I got the bug to be really the host, the designer, the instigator of bringing things together. And I never seem to shed that identity after making that turn.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s really interesting that you use these other nouns like host and instigator quite often, folks that are exhibiting facilitation skills or collaborative leadership skills and putting these tools and these competencies to work. They often don’t identify as a facilitator, but there’re these other nouns, these other titles or roles or these identities that they’re called to. I’m curious if you have other thoughts on that.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Yeah, I think in recent years, especially as I started leaning in on the Voltage Control professional learning, I realized a lot of my early learning and facilitation was being mentored alongside somebody. And so I wasn’t naming certain moves so I didn’t know. I was creating with them. So as I got further along in facilitation, liberating structures, for instance, would be like a model where I’d be looking at some of the protocols and going, “Oh, I kind of created those similar experiences.” So I think early on it was a very organic, I was watching and creating and thinking about the experience. And as I’ve gotten more seasoned at it, the more I’m naming what I’m doing, the more I can experience another facilitator’s moves and I can see behind it to see how they’re weaving together different protocols, maybe how they’re thinking about their arcs and how they want to have us have an experience. But in my early years of facilitation, I was totally not aware of that orchestration. I was doing it organically alongside those who I think probably had ways of naming it and I didn’t.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s really fascinating, this level of maturity and situational awareness that you speak about. And it can help us plan and be more mindful of how we approach facilitation. Do you recall a moment or a trigger where you feel like you transitioned or is it more just iterative over time?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I would say I led the facilitation work with the writing project for I’d say three or four summers. And I’d say during that time I started also leading more inside of my district work, and I was leading more meetings. I was putting together different projects, and so I was having to design and facilitate that. And I’d say I really made that turn when I saw that it was feeling more comfortable, like it was in my bones, it was me, and I saw the impact it was having on others when they were conveying to me how powerful the community was that we had, how sad they were when something wrapped up. And I saw this tremendous impact that I was having in creating these experiences. And I think that was really the trigger that also led me to leave the classroom and to become more of a regional consultant.

And that’s when I really made the shift because my whole job was leading and developing professional learning. It wasn’t unusual for me to be in front of a few hundred people or try and create a workshop that had 70 people in it, but trying to make it really impactful when there’s one of you or two with some co-leads, all the decision making that I had to do.

So my facilitation journey really started, I think in a really small context where I was with small groups, and then the more I got confident and the more I pushed to be in that world of facilitation, the bigger the audiences became for me, and the stakes got higher as well. A lot of the things that I was leading were statewide projects that had to have deliverables, and I’d not ever had that kind of pressure on me as a facilitator. Now it wasn’t about just helping people through a journey, you also had to do it in a way that got to a deliverable and make it meaningful to them and as authentic as possible. But that was also tricky. So it was like layers of complexity kept coming on each year I continued in that role as a facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting. At first I was noticing this maybe level of practice that was happening where you were just getting more reps and more opportunity, but then as the story unfolded, I was hearing that there was also to use your language, these layers of complexity or the stakes were getting higher and higher the deeper you went. And it seems like those two things probably correlate.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Yeah. It’s one thing to say, “I really want to create this professional learning community that people want to be in because they feel it’s feeding their needs, whatever their individual needs are for learning, for stretching themselves in their practice.” That can be pretty organic and you can allow for people to go in lots of different directions. But when you start having to come in and get a group to a finish line, but you don’t want to do it in such a way that they don’t feel like it’s a ride they even want to be on, you have to then really think about, well, how do we get there in a way that honors also what they feel they need in this experience? So that really, I think, significantly upped my learning curve.

And it was during those years when I was a regional literacy consultant that because I was working basically with the Michigan Department of Education in some respects, in terms of turnaround with schools, I had a lot of opportunities to learn lots of different models of coaching, of protocols to use. And so I kept beefing up this toolbox that I had, but I was also adamant that it wasn’t about just being one model, which I would butt heads with colleagues, because when you are working for a larger governmental agency, you have to follow certain ways that they want the work to happen. And so as a facilitator, sometimes I felt that my hands were tied to coach people into leading the experiences with district members in ways that weren’t necessarily how I thought would get them to the best finish line.

Douglas Ferguson:

How did that unfold for you when you’re in those experiences? What were some of the tactics that you found were really helpful, and then how did it turn out?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think one of the things was getting an opportunity to design a learning experience with one of our districts that we were working with and having some of my colleagues alongside in that, and they were experiencing it, the learning alongside the district administrators and leaders. And at the end it was like, “Oh, I see what you did there.” And that was amazing how it had this level of impact. So I found the opportunities where I could put them into an experience and it would start shifting their perspective of what’s the best way to facilitate a certain project or a certain group to get to what they felt were the deliverables. So I was a part of a very large organization that, again, facilitation is not… Everybody has learned on different paths, and we were all coming together as consultants and we all had very different styles, and so we all would have opportunities to learn from each other, and that’s where you would start seeing some epiphanies, some alignments, some changes.

But I found it was more impactful to have someone experience it versus me saying, “You could do it this way or research says.” That wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind about what’s the best way we go about this. Ultimately, I left the regional role to be in a district system because I was wanting to have more ownership over how you could design projects going forward. And I also felt that I could be closer again to the individuals, the teachers, administrators, the students in which I wanted to create a positive impact for. So to your question, how did I finally handle that? In some respects, it led me to take a different path.

Douglas Ferguson:

And oftentimes the frustrations, the frictions are signals that we’re not on the path, we’re in the briars. One thing I wanted to touch back on was something that emerged from me as I was hearing about your experiences of them getting the epiphany at the end. And it made me think about the word patience, the patience that we expect out of our participants and the patience that is required of us to be willing to let our participants be in a state that… They might not be where we want them, but having the patience to know that they’ll get there. I’m curious. I bet you have a lot of experience around this, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that duality.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Oh, yes. So in the work that I’ve done, I always call it, it’s really identity work because a lot of the times I was called in or leading something with practitioners, it was because there was the hope for some type of evolution or growth or shift in practice. And people step into that with values and beliefs on what they think is the best way for someone to learn or to experience something, and that it’s a lot wrapped in their identity. It’s their values, it’s their lived experience. So how far you need to try and nudge that can take time, and it needs to be done, as you said, at a pace that is respectful of the person who’s on a journey to make that transformational shift. So when I would be called in to work with a district system or a group of teachers, many times I was talking with someone higher up in a leadership role and their mindset was, “Well, can you work them with them for two full days? And by the end of that, can they have made this big a shift?” Which was usually a no.

So there was a total underestimating of how much time really people need to sit in something, and to sit in it in a way where there’s a constant little bit of burn that keeps the fire going versus we’re going to do a session and you’re not going to talk about it or think about it for a month and then we’re going to come back together and I’ll expect that probably you’ve made a change. It doesn’t work that way. Where are those continuity lines of, what are you trying? What are you thinking about? How are you continuing to reflect on this? When you’ve tried something out, what has happened? What has that made you think now differently? What are you going to try the next time? It’s all those multiple iterations that need to really be there if you’re really trying to shift people in whatever practice or shift in what you’re hoping to grow them to.

But unfortunately, many times what I have encountered is this idea of a one and done. In education, it’s very hard for teachers to be outside of their classrooms. So there’s a lot of pressure that whatever they’re pulled out to do, it better not be for very much time and great things better come out of it. So that has been my experience in an education-based facilitation for the most part. And that has always been very hard. You have to negotiate usually as if I was a facilitator talking with an administrator asking me to come in and consult, I’d have to manage their expectations and also get clarity of where really realistically we can get.

And so I really had to build that part of my facilitation learning, which is really the pre-facilitation where you’re talking with the potential clients, so to speak, and you’re trying to figure out what they really, really want. Because many times they don’t articulate exactly what they really want. They think they are, but after you have a conversation and you say some things back and pose it differently, it would be very different than what they thought they were saying was the thing that needed to happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

And what’s your go-to strategy or tactic to get the juice there, to get to the reality?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Oh, I usually would try and have one or two pre-conversations before coming in, and I would really be open-ended questions like, “Tell me about what’s going on, what are you hoping for? What do you think are the biggest obstacles? What do you think looks like the ultimate? If we could beat this, what would it look like? What would it sound like?” And so really me talking less, them talking more and continue those open-ended questions. So I’d want to exhaust them with it. There’s a fine line where you can ask too many questions, but it was really getting them to talk out loud about what is it that your thinking is the need here. But also finding out the sticky spots because many times I also wanted to understand things in the contextual system because sometimes that was going to undo anything. So I could come in and work on something, but they would unknowingly be perpetuating something in their routines that was going to not make it work.

Douglas Ferguson:

In addition to these elements that might be detracting from the work, what other things are you listening for in these conversations?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I’m always trying to understand the culture. Any place has a culture and you’re stepping into it. Many times when I was called in to consult and hired in, even outside of the system where I was working, I learned very quickly I was being called in because one, it might be too dangerous for anyone internally to do the work. Two, things were broken and I needed to understand really quickly, what were the dynamics going on in that context? What was the culture? Because how I designed also the learning and how I thought about who also were the individuals who were going to be coming into the room. I needed to understand what they were living in and how safe or dangerous it was for them to even push in certain directions with some of their instructional practices.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to talk a little bit about the transition you made from K-12 into embracing facilitation in more diverse context. And I’m curious if you could share a pivotal moment that signified to you that the transition was not just necessary but possible.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think that I started thinking about this in the last, I’d say three years before I ended my K-12 career. And I had been a part of some community stakeholder meetings, and Eric, your colleague and I had actually led some of these community stakeholder meetings. We were as a district going for a really large bond to totally overhaul almost every single building in the district. And so it was navigating working with community members, it was teachers, it was administrators, it was parents. And seeing that design play out and standing alongside Eric who we had done educational consulting work together, and now he was starting to make that straddling out of not just education but into industry. I think that was the moment that I was like, “Huh, I’ve been doing this in education, but maybe other people value it outside of education.” And that’s when I started getting involved in Voltage Control in workshops in the lab.

And I had great imposter syndrome the first, I’d say two years because I was in awe of the people I was meeting virtually around the globe. And when they would in breakout rooms, be really interested in what I had to say, I was always surprised. I didn’t really think I was going to bring anything that fantastic to the table here. I was an educator and my facilitation was all in that world, but I was finding that people were seeking me out who weren’t educators and who wanted me to be a thinking partner with them. And through those conversations, it was like for me, I felt like I was gaining more than I was giving because I was like, “Oh, I guess I really do know something here and I do think it can translate and I need to explore this.” And so that’s really the road I’m on at this point, is seeing how I pivot what I’ve learned into a non-education based audience.

But also, it never stops. You have to continuously be learning. So I certainly don’t feel like I climbed the mountain. I’m at the top. As AI has come on and ChatGPT, a lot of work is gone to all online. And so doing really impactful facilitation in a digital world, those are all those new stretch points for me. And it’s exciting. It’s exciting to really keep growing.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting you brought up imposter syndrome because I was going to that next, because you had mentioned earlier in the episode about wringing your hands over the talk at the summit, and this came up in your alumni story too. And so I wanted to come back to clearly you experience it like many people, myself included, but you’ve overcome it. And so I’m curious, what strategies or mindsets did you find to be the most effective in overcoming these barriers?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think for me, I’ve been blessed with having some great mentor and shoulder partners who are always confirming, you really do know something that’s valuable. But honestly, I put my hand up to facilitate at the summit because I was like, this is the moment I have to push myself to lead a group that is not an education-based audience. And so that leading up to that session, I was continuously designing, redesigning, designing, redesigning. My internal voice was talking back to me saying, “Susan, what are you doing? You don’t usually need this much time to put a session together. What is going on?” And it was my constant fear of am I not going to know the audience? And that’s where I realized, I really rely heavily on knowing my audience when I designed facilitation and I was really questioning if I knew them well enough.

And so by living through that experience and having people give me positive feedback after, that was the ripping the bandaid off moment for me. Like, “Okay, I’ve done it. I can do this.” And even though I’ve been involved in some other facilitation with Voltage Control, that summit was probably the most pivotal turn for me because I had to on my own stand up and do that work. I on my own designed it. I didn’t have any scaffold crutches in that process. So thank you for allowing me to facilitate the summit and make that big growth leap for myself.

Douglas Ferguson:

Happy to do so. And it’s by design. We pivoted the summit to focus on students and alumni and really provide these opportunities for practice and growth. And I was hopeful it would be transformative. And it sounds like we’re doing a decent job there. So I’m thrilled and we’re happy to have you. And it makes me think of something else I wanted to bring up with you, which is this idea of embracing vulnerability and stepping outside of comfort zones and how crucial that is for growth. And so I’d just be curious to hear how vulnerabilities played a role in your facilitation practice as a core, and especially when dealing with unfamiliar audiences.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

So in my writing project background and in the teaching of writing, I really developed my own ability to be vulnerable with others because writing is really many times brings up vulnerabilities for people. And also in the work that we were doing through our writing project site, those four-week institutes were transformative where you were really working on making some deep shifts for people. And we learn to handle many times deep emotions. So I don’t get afraid anymore when I see some emotions bubble up for people in a session, I can lean into it. And so that background experience really helped me. So it taught me to turn a switch. So when I know that I’m hosting and trying to create that experience for others, I allow myself to be very vulnerable, to be very open because I know I’ll grow in it, but I know it also helps them step into being vulnerable alongside me.

So going into the summit, I made a decision to be pretty vulnerable in that room because I knew I was designing something that could potentially make them feel very vulnerable. So I knew I had to right off the bat, have a voice of connection with them, and this is me, the sincerity, the honesty, me without putting on any facade, and I’m willing to share these struggles I have in the invitation that they may also be bringing up their own. So I have to say it was really a background from the writing project that helped me do that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Isn’t it interesting how some of these moments through our career and our life journey can just stick with us and inform all the future things we do? It’s quite cool. I did want to touch on your doctorate really quickly, and when we were talking about it at the summit, you told me about how the work you were doing was based on going through and cataloging and analyzing your journals throughout your life. I found that really fascinating, and especially in this conversation around vulnerability and how writing can bring up emotions. And there’s a reason people lock their diaries, they don’t want their older brother reading them. And so here you are, this future version of yourself going back and reading these things and going through them in a very methodological way. And so I’m curious, how did that feel peering back at yourself? Did you notice a vulnerableness to that?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Oh yeah. So it was an auto ethnography approach to the research. And so yes, I am a proliferate hoarder of my notebooks. I’m eclectic too. I grab a notebook and sometimes it can have multiple things in it. It’s not just for one purpose or one group. So I had journals from my undergrad college days all the way up to present day. And what I was looking at was the impact of being a teacher leader, but being a leader of for other adults is really at the heart of teacher leadership and how that had impacted my identity evolution across 20 plus years. And I had to suspend, it wasn’t about me coming to what I wanted was the conclusion. I had to see it as data on the paper. And there were errors. I started seeing phases. And so I started creating timelines. And there were times in my life that as I was reliving them in the notebook, I was like, “Can this please be done again?” I was a lot to take back then.

And it was also very vulnerable for me to choose that as my dissertation because I had to use some very personal information and I was talking about me. And a lot of the data excerpts that I put in my dissertation are extremely vulnerable pieces about me struggling in some way with who am I, where am I going, what am I doing? And my committee chair and committee members were even commending me for the courage to do what I did because they chose not to do an auto ethnography themselves. They wanted to keep it distant from them. So I don’t know why that is. As I said, I’ve been an introvert, a really quiet person, but I also feel like these authentic connections are so powerful. And so I, when I feel like I have sincerity with the person, I will be very vulnerable and open up. And so that dissertation definitely was a journey, and there are definitely some errors of my life that I’m glad are done.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting your point you made about you were a lot to take at that point, and it reminded me of the point we were making about patience, and you had to be patient with yourself as you were reliving that. And wow, what a profound thing to experience. Because if you can be patient with yourself, this part of yourself that you don’t appreciate a lot or that you’re like, “I’m glad that I’m not that anymore,” I imagine that can be a great tool for being more patient with others that are maybe not cooperating with whatever we’re trying to do.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Well, I think one of my favorite phrases in the last few years is about giving grace. Giving grace to those who you see that they’re having a struggle. They might not even know that they’re in midst of some conflict, internal conflict, but outwardly it’s coming out. And many times as that’s become a thread in education as well, is like instead of the quick reaction of jumping to conclusions and negative conclusions, how can you give grace more frequently and really step back and try and understand where are they at? What is going on in their lives at this point? And I feel very blessed that I was surrounded by a lot of mentors who gave me a lot of grace in some certain parts of my life professionally.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we’re reaching the end here, and I wanted to end by just peering into the future a little bit. And so you’ve achieved a significant number of milestones in your career and have gone through this transition, are now looking at a diversity of different facilitation environments. So I’m just curious, what new horizons and challenges are you looking forward to exploring?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think of Eli Wood. When I had a conversation with Eli, one of our Voltage Control colleagues, and I hadn’t quite made that leap yet. I hadn’t retired from my K-12 to go into full-time consulting. And he said one of his wise mentors that says, “You’ve got to get hungry.” And I have constantly come back to that phrase of like, now’s the time to take the leap and to really to dig in and to make facilitation a full-time part of my life, and for it to be beyond an educational based audience. I think my heart will always be somewhat tied to trying to grow future teacher leaders who in essence, what I am probably growing is them as facilitators. Because a lot of your leading is about facilitating and your peers as a teacher leader. And that was what my dissertation was really around.

But I really want to branch out into just audiences who it’s not about what industry they’re from. You’re creating some transformative experience for them. And to design into multiple kinds of situations, I really am excited. There are days where I’m a little bit, not scared, but it’s not a path I know. So I’m learning tremendously every day. How do you make this happen? This isn’t a K-12 or higher ed education endeavor now. This is like edupreneur, like an entrepreneurial educator who’s branching out, and it’s exciting and it’s daunting at the same time. But I’ve made it to this point, it’s time to take that plunge and persevere and make it happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s exciting. Well, I hope that maybe some listeners out there are on the same precipice, and maybe this gives them a little bit of confidence and encourage listeners to check out Susan’s good work, and maybe she can inspire you to make that leap that you need to make. And Susan, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and hope to talk to you again soon.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Thanks Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog, or I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.