I’m super excited to share a new facilitator resource from the PLIX Team:
A Personas Activity for Practicing Facilitation of Creative Learning Experiences
This activity is designed for library staff or other educators who would like to practice their facilitation skills in a group — beginners encouraged! 
Full documentation of this activity can be found on the PLIX Activity Repository.
This activity is a riff on a role-play scenario session. It’s ideal for groups with one to two designated “facilitators” and others designated as “participants." The facilitator(s) should be given supplies to run a simple making activity (like PLIX Paper Circuits). Participants are each given one of the activity’s persona cards. The group will then spend ~30 minutes running the activity “in character”.
The personas were crafted very thoughtfully, and based on PLIX Team experiences facilitating and participating in creative STEAM activities. We understand personas are not monoliths, so we made sure to design our personas more as guides. We also avoided making personas that were strictly “positive” or “negative,” but rather based on traits, comfort levels, and approaches to learning (which can all be expressed in many different ways).
The purpose of this activity is two-fold:
- To practice facilitating an activity while not feeling like an expert
- To build empathy among facilitators for learners who may approach an activity differently than they would
We think this activity could work great as an internal PD experience that you could run with your staff or colleagues. Shout out to all the attendees of our PLIX@Akron Workshop who playtested this activity and shared a lot of valuable feedback that we’ve incorporated into this documentation.
Some open questions that we’re still thinking about:
- How might we run this activity completely online?
- What personas are missing?
We’d love any feedback or thoughts you might have. If you’ve run this activity or have any questions, ask away in the thread below!