Facilitator guide: Forty-Five Seconds to Make It Clear

Suggested session: 30 minutes: 5-minute framing, 10-minute drafting, 8-minute timing and revision, 7-minute paired feedback. Invite learners to use invented or low-stakes topics if workplace material is sensitive.

Preparation and participation

Provide low-risk sample topics for anyone who does not want to use a personal or professional example. Allow learners to work alone, in pairs, or by observing a demonstration. Ask listeners to report what they heard before offering advice. Offer a quiet written-only route, transcripts for any shared audio, flexible pacing, and a non-recording option. Collect only artifacts learners choose to share.

Facilitation Priorities

• Emphasize understandable and authentic over polished and promotional.
• Remind learners to inspect and decline unnecessary questions.
• Have learners read aloud privately or with a partner; do not require public performance.
• Treat 45 seconds as a practice constraint and 90–105 words only as a starting band. The gallery’s timed examples in that band ran about 42–45 seconds; each learner’s pace, pauses, and phrasing decide the result.
• Ask learners to name what they protected, not only what they changed.
• Celebrate a reasoned stopping decision even when the artifact remains rough.
• Watch for learners treating an AI draft as their voice or trying to satisfy three audiences at once.

Common Difficulties

• The chatbot asks too many questions: cap the number and require material relevance.
• The draft sounds generic: provide protected phrases and a sample of natural language.
• The learner keeps revising: return to the original goal and split blockers from polish.
• A likely objection takes over the speech: decide whether it belongs in the artifact or a follow-up answer.
• The activity feels like selling: switch to explaining a hobby, role, community activity, or fictional project.

Evidence of learning

Look for the learner’s ability to explain choices, criteria, rejected suggestions, preserved voice, timing changes, and stopping logic. Productive failure includes a script that is 70 seconds, too broad, or full of unexplained shorthand; it makes selection visible. Do not score primarily on presentation quality.

Provisional timing for facilitator planning

These inherited estimates are starting points for facilitation, not completion targets for learners. Refine them after observing setup, access needs, discussion, and actual participation.

• Lab: 20–30 minutes (short: 12; extended: 60)

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Source: labs/forty-five-seconds-to-make-it-clear/facilitator-guide.md