Cooperate and Escape: My first experience as a facilitator

This Autumn was very active for Shokkin Group Estonia, with local and international projects taking place almost every week. Let’s come back to mid-september to the project “Cooperate and Escape” with Shokkin Group Estonia and La Vibria Intercultural.

The project took a place in the outskirts of Barcelona, where participants from 9 countries came together to discover a new non-formal education approach through portable educational escape rooms. You might remember Createamity or Critical Escape (a year long project in Estonia and Sweden). But there was something special about Cooperate and Escape. This time one more person joined the trainers team! Through Theodor Heuss Kolleg’s educational program of facilitators, Anna Arharova had a chance to practise her knowledge and skills as a junior trainer-facilitator.

“These year I started my acquaintance with the art of facilitation. I remember myself in the training course in Berlin learning the theory in the frame of the THK program more that half a year ago. At that time I had just done my first steps in session preparation and implementation from the perspective of facilitator.

I finally understood the difference between trainer and facilitator, yay! But only understanding and theory is not enough and our mentors explained that we should have at least 2 practices during this year. After 7 months, it finally happened and I had a chance to work with the amazing team of trainers of Shokkin Group Estonia: Pavel Vasiljev and Olalla González. The format of the training was not new for me, but once I saw participants I become very nervous for no reason :D.”

The training course included escape room developing theory, tips and creating process. The biggest challenge of the format was that participants had only around 24 hours to create their own escape rooms from the very first brainstorming to the set of the escape room elements that covered educational points and portability objectives.

“Spoiler: Participants completed the challenge 200% and eventually created 4 amazing escape rooms on different topics. I believe everybody from the trainers and organizators to participants felt the pressure of time. We had only 5 days to go through all the theory and practice needed including developing and testing time.

I was sure about the professionality of the team, but still it seemed like we used a bit of magic, because every participant, even those who hadn’t heard about escape rooms before, managed to learn all the basics and practicalities to build and run their own room in such a short time. I was amazed how easily it went and how high was the level of communication in the teams!”

Participants covered topics such as: Data Security, Fake News, Activism and Job Interview. After developing and testing, participants went to the closest city named Sant Cugat del Vallès to a vocational school to run the game for students.

“This is when the miracle happened. Everyone from game masters to players were excited to see the games in action. Even teachers were amazed by the creativity of our participants and the method itself. I felt very happy as well cause I had a chance to follow and influence their educational process!! I am looking forward for my new practice with THK educational program!”.