By Miranda L. Egger & Lawrence Ramos
Here's a phrase you've probably heard if you've attended a PREP curriculum training (or just about any other relationship education (RE) program training): "The messenger matters. You're the one who breathes life into the workshop."
Let's unpack what we mean by that.
To be clear, PREP Inc. and many other RE curricula have already done a lot of the heavy lifting before you ever get the Facilitator Guide in your hands: collecting best practices, sequencing activities, designing media, and distilling content. It's all sitting there in your Facilitator Guide, ready to go. Yet there’s an uncomfortable truth lingering: a beautifully designed curriculum can still flop in the room. Why? Because learning isn't just about what's on the page. It's about what's happening in the person receiving it. That's where the facilitator comes in.
In this post, we're asking facilitators to recognize the power they have to breathe life into any curriculum in a way that meets their learners where they are and as they are, fully. Only then can we do the real work of supporting learners as they examine their most intimate relationship patterns and help them to believe change is possible. Let’s take a look at the science of adult learning, which is called andragogy. That will help explain why the job of facilitator is bigger than simply knowing the curriculum well.
Adults Are Not Just Tall Children
Malcolm Knowles (1) figured this out back in the 1970s: adults don't learn like kids do. They show up with baggage (decades of it, actually) plus real problems, formed identities, and a rock-bottom intolerance for anyone wasting their time.
Knowles boiled his research down to six things adults need in order to actually learn:
They need to know why.
They need it to connect to real life.
They need some control over the process.
They need it to solve an actual problem.
They need to be internally motivated (not just compliant).
They need to believe they're capable of growth.
Now run that list through what happens in a relationship education workshop. How many of your participants walked in skeptical? Or feeling like they have an actual problem needing a solution? Or who have had life experiences that made them believe nothing about their relationships could really change? Or being already burned by systems that told them what to do without ever asking who they were? These and other factors make facilitating hard and learning harder. This is not people trying to be challenging; it’s data reflecting what you haven't earned yet.
Before a single slide loads, your participants have already decided something about you and the room. That's disposition, or their readiness posture, shaped by every teacher, boss, judge, or caseworker who's ever "taught" them something before.
For a lot of the people we serve, those past educational experiences were not gentle, so the disposition they arrive with is armor that reads as disengagement. Your job, before you teach a single skill, is to work with that armor. In this post, we identify three important ways a facilitator can be the messenger that matters to those in their room.
The Facilitator Is Not the Cultural Expert; the Participant Is
One consideration to help open someone’s disposition to learning is adapting for culture. Cultural adaption is one of the tougher things for curriculum developers to accomplish, and for many reasons (not the least of which is the question, “which culture?”). To nail aspects of culture for everyone who attends is difficult for developers and a moving target for facilitators.
Accomplishing a thoughtful adaptation “in the room” is where the messenger truly matters. Sometimes, a facilitator serves people who come from a relatively homogenous cultural background that the facilitator shares or has deep knowledge of, allowing for adjustments as they teach to reach the room. Other times, a facilitator knows the curriculum but does not understand the culture of most of the participants.
The good news is people don't need you to understand every culture before they walk through the door. But they do need to feel understood. You're never going to become an expert on every culture, community, or life experience represented in your classroom. That's not the assignment. The assignment is curiosity. With curiosity, the most powerful cultural adaptation happens between the facilitator and the participants.
Here’s how: participants are the experts on their own lives. They know the words their families use, the values that shaped them, the pressures their communities face, and the stories that explain why they see relationships the way they do. Your job isn't to replace that expertise with your own. It's to create enough psychological safety that people can connect the curriculum to their own experiences.
Effective cultural adaptation also isn't about rewriting evidence-based principles to fit every audience. Rather, it's about helping participants recognize themselves in the examples, discussions, and activities that bring those principles to life. Sometimes that's as simple as inviting different perspectives, adding examples you have learned are relevant, or listening long enough for someone else's experience to become part of the lesson.
Rather than aiming for cultural expertise, the goal is cultural humility — the willingness to remain curious, assume less, and trust that learning becomes more meaningful when you can help participants bridge the gap between the curriculum and their own lives. That’s breathing life into the curriculum and welcoming everyone into the learning experience.
Feelings Are Not a Distraction from Learning
Another essential element to being an effective messenger of the curriculum is recognizing that feelings matter. Here's a bit of neuroscience to help make this point: emotion and cognition are not separate systems politely taking turns. Research shows emotionally engaged adults retain information at roughly double the rate of neutral, bored-out-of-their-mind learners (2). If the emotional texture isn't there, the brain treats the moment as noise and tosses it.
Picture a generic worksheet with names and scenarios that feel nothing like your participants' actual lives? It's not just "kind of irrelevant." It is neurologically un-learnable. Their brain looked at the worksheet and said, "not filing this." That means a facilitator has to make the content (and the room) come alive. A great facilitator is blending humor, compassion, and warmth while remaining cognizant of how the content intersects with emotion in peoples’ lives.
Reducing Barriers to Engagement
Let’s look at another major consideration in the ways facilitators deliver the curriculum in a way that lands well with learners: it’s called Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (3). The idea behind UDL is that we can reduce some of the most common barriers to learning in the way we prepare to deliver and engage the materials. UDL reminds facilitators to design with three important levers in mind:
1. Provide multiple means of engagement (the why) — offer choice, name the purpose of each activity and discussion out loud, build in breathing room.
2. Deliver material through multiple means of representation (the what) — say it, show it, write it. Roughly 1/5 adults have an undiagnosed learning difference and multiple modes of delivery make all the difference.
3. Allow for multiple means of action and expression (the how) — not everyone can safely raise a hand and share. Give people choices in the ways they engage the material—a pen, a partner, a private option.
These are levers good facilitators learn to pull. You can use these three levers to audit your workshops for unnecessary barriers and knock them down before they become someone's reason to exit. These are often small moves, but they can open pretty big doors.
Finally…
We think educators might benefit from shifting their idea of great facilitation from deliverer of information to architect of a positive learning experience designed with your specific participants in mind. Your participants don't just need you to get comfortable with the curriculum; they also need you to recognize the value of their emotional engagement, be curious enough to consider cultural adaptations, and design for universal accessibility — all of which are structural foundations for everything else we're trying to do.
The messenger matters. That’s you. You are bridging the gap between the curriculum and your participants’ ability to take up and apply the important lessons presented in the curriculum. In this work, that effort makes all the difference.
For more information on PREP’s family of curricula, see our Resource Guide: https://prepinc.com/pages/resource-guide.
(1). Knowles, M. S. (1970). The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus pedagogy. New York: New York Association Press.
(2). Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (1995). A novel demonstration of enhanced memory associated with emotional arousal. Consciousness and Cognition, 4(4), 410–421. https://doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1995.1048
(3). CAST (2024). CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Retrieved from https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Miranda L. Egger & Lawrence Ramos are Senior Trainers/Instructional Designers with PREP Inc.
