7.2 Facilitating an in person dialogue
The Politics Project is unable to facilitate in person Dialogue sessions. You will have to facilitate these yourself. We will do all the same work booking in an in person session as we do an online session - we will find a date and time that suits you and the politician and send them a brief and instructions on getting to the school. We just won’t be there on the day.
Your role
You will have the same responsibilities around supporting learners to engage in an in person Dialogue session as you do in a Digital Dialogue. On top of that you will need to do the following.
Manage the session timings
You will need to give the politician an idea of how many questions there will be/are left so they can tailor the length of their answers accordingly.
Ask the politician to briefly introduce themselves
At the beginning of the session get the politician to give a quick introduction of themselves. We suggest telling them to keep to 2 minutes - without a time limit they can end up doing a very long introduction leaving the learners less time to ask their questions.
Give the politician the opportunity to ask the learners questions
The best dialogue sessions are conversations between learners and politicians. Give the politician the opportunity to ask questions of their own.
Some politicians will ask questions of the learners as part of their answers to the learner questions. Others though will need prompting to ask questions and you can directly ask the politician to ask questions two or three times during the session.
Note any pledges
If the politician offers to do something on behalf of the learners please note them down and then inform The Politics Project. We will log it as a “Pledge”. We will follow up with the politician to determine a plan of action for achieving the pledge, and will communicate the outcome to you. We also track pledges on our website here.
Take photos of the Dialogue
If you would like to use the Dialogue session to promote your school and your young people then take photos and videos for your school or college’s social media channels. The Politics Project can also post about the event.
