Teaching as the Facilitation of Learning.
Recently I facilitated a workshop on teaching as facilitation.
Yes, it’s all very meta-: facilitating a workshop on how to facilitate.
When we think about teaching, we often think of what we will teach, and that’s often: what we will say.
If, however, we shift our focus to the students, we begin to see that teaching also involves developing activities in which students can involve themselves. This is not easy. It’s a skill you can develop. But it doesn’t come quickly, and it’s hard to find guidelines.
Facilitation is a nice stepping stone to engaging activities, because we can simply ask the students about work they have done or are doing.
“Facilitation” refers to the actual process in the classroom by which we interact with students to support their learning. Facilitation is a real-time process that unfolds in response to all the active participants in the room.
That may sound unstructured, but in fact, facilitation can be broken down into just three steps.
- Checking in. Identifying where the learners are.
- Identifying gaps — between where the learners are and where they need to be.
- Helping to identify steps the learners can take, right then or later, to bridge this gap.
These three steps can be broken down further and repeated. But these basic steps can take us quite a long way.
Of course, finding out what the learner needs doesn’t have to happen through facilitation. You could:
- give a test —
- carefully calibrated to diagnose not only what the students didn’t know but also why, and —
- then provide learning materials to remedy each possible problem.
Adaptive learning software is supposed to do something like that, but for most of us it’s not yet within easy reach. And as with so many technologies, it will only be as good as its design.
Happily, we don’t need software when we have facilitation: the live human interactive process of understanding the learner’s state, the gap between that state and a goal state, the cause of the gap, and steps to close the gap.
In the case of this workshop I conducted, the flow of events was as follows.
1. I gave the participants something to do which could help move them towards a meaningful goal.
- This was a workshop for teachers, so he meaningful goal was to develop a useable notion of better teaching.
- The activity was recalling examples of bad teaching.
- I picked bad teaching because it’s easier to describe, and I reasoned: if you’re moving away from bad teaching you’re likely moving towards good teaching.
- In this case, I decided that each person would need her own plan for moving towards that goal.
2. I facilitated a discussion.
- As individuals shared their relevant experiences — ‘this was bad teaching,’ ‘that was bad teaching,’ — I paraphrased so I could assure the participants (and myself) that I was understanding them.
- I asked follow-up questions to understand the significance of the experiences the participants described. ‘It was a waste of my time,’ the participant says. ‘You resented the teacher for wasting your time, and wasting and the resentment together interfered with learning.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘So when you say the instructor read out of a book, you sound irritated.’ ‘It was a waste of my time,’ the participant says. ‘You resented the teacher for wasting your time, and wasting and the resentment together interfered with learning.’ ‘Yes.’
- That is: I didn’t just ask questions, get and confirm answers; I tried to construct a cause-effect chain, and I didn’t leave out the human element: the feelings.
- As we went along, I pointed out similarities and contrasts amongst the viewpoints of the participants. This was my attempt to build a possible shared mental model of ‘bad teaching’ from which ‘good teaching’ could be extrapolated by contrast and inference.
- Each participants views could become part of something larger.
- Secretly, I was mentally mapping these experiences against the categories I wanted to introduce. I had information to share, and I wanted to organize the students’ experiences in the same way as the information I would be sharing.
3. I then introduced a framework of ideas which could summarize and integrate the bad teaching experiences the workshop participants had recalled.
- This was projected on a screen so everyone could see it.
- I explicitly mapped the experiences the participants shared against these categories I had built in advance. The fit was good, so the categories seemed to capture well the gist of our conversation.
- Extensive empirical research on teaching, it turns out, mapped exactly with the workshop participants’ experiences of bad teaching: their experiences of bad teachers aligned point-for-point with what research tells us about good teaching — just reversed.
Effective teachers communicate clearly, help the learner feel good about herself, accurately understand the learner, value the learner as an individual, present themselves in an authentic way.
- Needless to say, by facilitating I was trying to do exactly these things.
4. I then explained the research a bit further, and I asked the participants to provide their own hypothetical explanations as to why some classroom interactions are more effective than others.
- This was a movement towards action: how could you get from bad teaching towards good? How can you create an internal mental model or rule-of-thumb you could use to operationalize personal experience distilled into concepts supported by empirical research.
- I shared some larger mental models (teacher- vs. learner-centered) as well as some specific classroom behaviors that have strong positive (or negative) effects.
- In short, I offered more concepts and details the participants could use to organize their thinking towards a meaningful goal: better teaching.
Together as a group we had built a portrait of a goal state, and we were now building an action-oriented model of how the participants might get there.
5. I then reviewed what we’d done and asked the participants what they needed to get closer to feeling confident about how to facilitate conversations in the classroom.
- This was in a sense another ‘loop’ or round of facilitation: the three steps again. I was ‘checking in.’
- We identified a difficult-to-define goal state: good teaching.
- We identified concrete non-ideal states: bad teaching.
- We built individual and collective mental models of bad and good teaching.
- We built individual and collective mental models to explain the difference between bad and good teaching.
- And we formulated action steps to move towards good teaching.
But I did not stop then and assume everything was fine and dandy. I asked what additional help the participants needed to reach the goal state.
- We could then refine our sense of the gap between where the learners were and where they needed to be.
- One participant requested that we talk about what actually to do in the classroom step by step, so we looked at some ‘instructional sequences.’
- These were in fact very close to the kind of facilitating I’d been doing and which I am describing and summarizing here after the fact.
- This way I could introduce some action steps which they had just seen and experienced.
Ideally, the participants would then practice these actions in groups: say, teach a small lesson. But this was a short workshop, so there was not time for another ‘loop,’ another movement towards defining actions that take the learner closer to the goal state.
6. Finally, I asked the participants to formulate a takeaway or plan they might apply in teaching.
- These were all different, though complementary.
Now it is true that calculus cannot be taught by reflecting on experiences of differentiation and integration. “What was it like that time you used the limit method of differentiation?” Some kind of explanation is usually necessary, although it may be in a textbook or on a video, not live in the classroom. But after the students have tried a few problems, you really can ask “How did it go for you — using the limit method of differentiation?”
But the same kind of instructional sequence I used in this workshop on facilitation, itself an extended version of a very broad sequence, would work for many kinds of classroom interactions.
1. Check in. Identify where the learners are.
- This might mean looking at quizzes taken outside of class to see what students aren’t getting.
- It might mean simply taking the pulse of the room.
How did you feel about the homework? How hard was it? Did it take longer than you thought? Was there a point where it suddenly got harder?
Checking in shows the students your concern and also helps you begin to identify the gap between where the students need to be and where they are.
2. Identify gaps between where the learners are and where they need to be.
- A quiz might show you this.
- Where the students got stuck on the homework might show you this.
- Or you might invent and pose a series of problems to see where they students are falling down in their understanding.
3. Help to identify steps the learners can take, right then or later, to bridge this gap.
- The steps the students need to take to get to the goal state may vary — largely based on the cause of the gap.
The causes of errors in learning can be quite long. But three categories are probably crucial: knowledge & information, procedures & skills, and attention, self-regulation & metacognition.
Knowledge & Information.
- Does the learner have the relevant background knowledge?
- Does the learner recognize all the relevant facts needed to solve the problem?
Procedures & Skills.
- Are the procedures for the institution and the course being followed? Signing into the web site, finding the book at the bookstore, etc.
- Is the learner applying the right procedure in the correct manner?
- Is it a question of knowing which procedure is right? Or does the learner not know the procedure itself well enough?
Attention, Self-regulation & Metacognition.
- Is the learner alert enough and focused enough?
- Is the learner’s stress level too high?
- Is the learner monitoring and managing the learning process effectively? Is she taking enough time to solve the problem?
- Is he checking his work, making predictions and then noticing when the predictions don’t match, etc. ?
There are other ways one can run afoul, but when these things go awry, the consequences are particularly bad.
It could take many questions to find out why the learners are not where they should be.
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The very simplest way to find out what your students need is simply to ask students to ‘think out loud’ about solving a particular problem or explaining a particular concept.
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If the instructor has mental categories for the different kinds of problems which may cause a gap between the student’s current state and the goal state, the diagnosis of the gap’s cause is less difficult than you might imagine.
Facilitating learning means helping and guiding the learner as she goes through a process that may be long and is likely relatively new to her. One expert teacher I know describes what he does in terms of driver’s education.
Do you remember how you learned to drive?
Someone sat beside you and talked you through the process as you drove.
That’s what this expert teacher wanted to be for his students: a facilitator.
And you can be too.
It’s just three steps and a lot of careful listening.
— Edward R. O’Neill
