During my time acting as the moderator in the deliberation process, there are several things that I learned about myself as moderator.
As to my moderating style, there are several things that I believed about myself as a group leader going into the discussions, but there are some things that I didn’t expect that I would do as a moderator, a position that I’ve never held before. Going into the deliberation, I knew what questions I definitely wanted to ask with regard to the topic so that we wouldn’t get too off-topic. From that, I realized that I like to be prepared and it’s important to me that deliberation stays on topic. In addition, during the deliberation, there were times when some more inflammatory comments were thrown around by group members, to which I had to remind everyone that we were deliberating, not arguing, since things had started to get into a personal realm at some points. So, from that I realized that one of my top priorities as the moderator was to keep everyone as level-headed as I could so that our conversation stayed away from arguing.
I think that one of my strengths was my ability to guide the conversation away from certain points that we were getting hung up on. If the deliberation got too heated or strayed too much from the original topic, or even if we’d just discussed something for a length of time and we were beginning to repeat ourselves, I would offer up another question to lead the conversation away from the point that was presently being discussed.
As for what I found challenging during my time as a moderator, I thought that it was difficult to try and keep my group members as level-headed as possible as to avoid squabbling about points that weren’t, or were barely relevant to the deliberation as a whole. Some people seemed to have deep-rooted personal feelings about certain things, such as government involvement, and tended to become a bit overzealous, which inhibited strong deliberation.
Lastly, with regard to my aforementioned challenges, there are a few things that I could do differently in the future, such as perhaps jump in to lead the conversation in a different direction at certain points as to avoid harping on relatively insignificant points for any extended length of time, as to allow for more discussion of the main points.