Facilitation Skills for Evaluators by Ann Price and Sheila B. Robinson

Date: Thursday, September 17, 2026

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.

Hi! We’re Dr. Ann Price, founder and President of Community Evaluation Solutions, and Dr. Sheila B. Robinson, owner of Custom Professional Learning, LLC. Ann has spent 25+ years she has partnered with communities, coalitions, nonprofits, and foundations to design, implement, and evaluate programs across education, public health, youth development, and community coalitions, while Sheila brings more than 30 years’ experience designing and facilitating professional learning on a multitude of topics for educators, evaluators, and other professionals. 

The International Association of Facilitators (IAF) defines facilitation as “the art of helping a group think together, explore options, and make decisions.” A facilitator’s job is to design and guide that process, clearing the way so that participants can place their full attention on ideas, relationships, and what they’re trying to achieve together. Professional facilitators bring a toolbox of time-tested strategies and design knowledge built across diverse types of groups. They know how to read a room, manage what’s happening between and among participants, and keep a conversation moving toward something useful. The job isn’t to hand people answers. Rather, it’s to help them find paths to their own solutions. Facilitation is a critical skill for evaluators who often lead groups in various stages of the evaluation process.

Hot Tips: Three facilitation moves you can try right away

1. Facilitation starts before anyone speaks. The room itself is already teaching people what kind of experience this will be: Furniture arrangement, materials on tables or walls, even the sounds in the room (music perhaps?) as people walk in give people clues, along with what the facilitator is doing (last-minute preparations? Greeting people at the door?). These are facilitation choices, not simply logistics. Before your next session, ask: what will people notice in the first minutes, and what does that tell them about how they’re expected to participate?

• The best question you can ask might be no question at all.
  Evaluators are trained to ask good questions. It’s central to our craft. Facilitation calls for a different move, however: active listening, a set of skills for making sure people feel truly heard. Reflective listening is one form of it: mirroring back what you heard instead of following up with another question. That pause matters. When you jump straight to the next question, you can unintentionally steer a group toward your framing before they’ve finished forming their own. Reflecting back without adding, interpreting, or redirecting keeps the thinking in the group’s hands and often takes a conversation somewhere richer than your next question might have.

• Choose activity to match the group’s needs.

It’s tempting to default to the way many of us were trained, relying on PowerPoint slides and lectures. But thinking deeply about the purpose of the meeting, workshop, or training session is important. Sometimes a group needs to learn something new, come to consensus, develop a strategy, or discuss something they are struggling with. Designing specific activities matched to the group’s purpose to move the group forward is an important facilitation skill.

Want to go deeper?

These are just three facilitation moves out of many that can make up a facilitator’s toolbox. Join us in Charlotte, NC for Facilitation Skills for Evaluators, a full-day, hands-on pre-conference workshop at Evaluation 2026 on November 17. The session is highly interactive, with plenty of space for your questions. You’ll leave with a broader repertoire of strategies you can put to work right away. Together, Ann and Sheila bring complementary and deeply aligned expertise to this workshop, combining decades of experience in facilitation, professional learning design, and evaluation.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.