Meeting Facilitation
Signature Course No. 46 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Meeting Facilitation course, in the Professional Development category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for everyone who calls, chairs, or facilitates meetings — managers and team leads whose calendars set the working temperature of a whole team, project leads and coordinators who run the standing meetings where work is actually steered, anyone who chairs a board, a committee, or a community group where attendance is voluntary, and capable professionals whose meetings undersell them. It works in the order the work has to happen: first, Module 1 — Before the Room: Decide Whether to Meet, and What the Meeting Is For — apply the cancellation test, state the purpose in one honest sentence and the outcome an outsider could check, build the room by capacity, write the agenda as decisions, design the preparation, keep the time budget, send the contract invitation, and audit the recurring series, finishing with The Meeting That Earns Its Hour; then, Module 2 — In the Room and After: Run It Toward a Decision, and Make the Decision Hold — open in five minutes, frame each decision, draw out the quiet voices, park tangents and keep the people, handle derailers without punishing dissent, test agreement at its true strength, decide and say it back, capture the record, and run the follow-through loop, finishing with The Decision That Holds. You finish by proving the whole course — in The Meeting That Earns Its Hour and in The Decision That Holds. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
The signature, stated plainly. This course works on your actual meetings. Most facilitation courses teach about meetings in the abstract and leave your calendar exactly as they found it. This one does not: bring a real meeting — one on your calendar this week — and the Coach will make you redesign it, concept by concept, until it earns its hour. One rule protects that signature, and it is absolute: do not paste anything you are not free to share: change the names, change the figures, keep the shape of the problem. Both capstones produce real artifacts — a redesigned meeting and a rebuilt decision that holds — not just ideas about meetings. The course also makes no claims it cannot keep: it prints no statistics about meetings — no invented figures for wasted time or executive hours — and teaches a meeting's cost qualitatively, from the arithmetic of your own calendar.
This is the forty-sixth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person training Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Before the Room → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Before the Room
The Coach starts by examining the meetings you actually run — which ones should not exist, what the survivors are for, and what your rooms look like from the invitee's side of the calendar, as they stand. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Meeting That Earns Its Hour for Module 1 and The Decision That Holds for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Most meetings fail before anyone sits down — in the invitation nobody questioned — and the rest fail in the room, where talk was never framed into a decision, or after it, where the decision was never captured and quietly came back. This course teaches the whole craft in its working order: decide whether a meeting should exist at all and state its purpose and outcome before invitations; build the room by capacity and the agenda as decisions to make; run the room toward a decision — frame it, hear the quiet voices, park tangents, handle derailers, and test agreement honestly; then say the decision back complete, capture it where it will be found, and follow through so it holds. The course works on your actual meetings throughout: bring real ones, anonymized, and leave with them rebuilt. No invented statistics — the cost of a meeting is taught from your own calendar.
What you will learn
- Decide whether a meeting should exist — and state its purpose and outcome before anyone is invited
- Build agendas as decisions to make, with the right people in the room and the work done before it starts
- Facilitate the room — draw out quiet voices, park tangents, and handle derailers without losing the people
- Capture decisions with owners and dates, and keep recurring meetings earning their place
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Meeting Facilitation, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Meeting That Earns Its Hour and The Decision That Holds
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for everyone who runs meetings
Meeting Facilitation is for everyone who calls, chairs, or facilitates meetings — managers and team leads whose calendars set the working temperature of a whole team; project leads and coordinators who run the standing meetings where work is actually steered; anyone who chairs a board, a committee, or a community group; and capable professionals whose meetings undersell them, strong judges of work whose rooms drift and whose decisions dissolve: decide whether a meeting should exist, build it as decisions to make, facilitate the room toward a decision, and follow through until the decision holds.
The signature applies here, too. This course works on your actual meetings: bring real meetings, anonymized — do not paste anything you are not free to share: change the names, change the figures, keep the shape of the problem — and leave with them rebuilt. The course assumes you have sat through enough meetings to recognize every failure it names; it does not assume anyone ever taught you to run one.
Prefer to train live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Meeting That Earns Its Hour
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Meeting Facilitation is Signature Course No. 46. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.