The relevance of Learning Science to education is being recognized and accepted by all the involved parties in learning. Be it it digital learning, conventional learning, formal learning or continuing learning, the value that understanding of learning science brings to learning is exponential. Without getting into the concepts and theories of the science, I distill 10 simple ideas that a facilitator can use to make their facilitation more productive. your views and thoughts are most welcome.
It is important for any facilitator to pay special attention to (and build a good understanding of) learning science. Learning science is an interdisciplinary field devoted to better understanding how learning happens and then applying that understanding to creating and improving learning design, methods, structure, platform, and any other aspects of learning.
While we look at the challenges and limitation around the policy, infrastructure and host of other aspects that impact education, we tend to ignore the simple yet effective points that a learning facilitator can adopt to make better impact at the most important level – where the learner meets the learning.
Let get to the 10 facilitator tips drawn from the learning science that could help making the process of facilitation more productive.
1. Gain attention – whatever be the subject and approach, to facilitate any learning, gaining attention of the audience is critical. The best place to start this is to get a learner perspective to the learning outcomes. It is important to remember that it is they who need to learn, and it will happen only when the process keeps them in the fore.
2. Inform – the next important part is to tell crisply and clearly what the objective and outcome is. Intended learning outcomes that define what a learner will acquire and able to do upon successful completion. Making sure that these are relevant, and they will lead to better performance will set the process in motion well.
3. Stimulate recall – At the start, a topic is better appreciated if the learner can recall each piece of information that would be useful to learn about the current topic. The learning design with links between items to make this recall faster enables better engagement and effective progress.
4. Engage with your content – just narrating or even presenting the content can be boring and gloomy. Take the note from the engaging narrative approaches that entertainment video uses. One doesn’t need to dilute the content but spend time to understand the aspects of the content that would elicit curiosity and motivations to consume.
5. Be mindful of memory expectations –the fact that the learner needs to be able to hold few key ideas in their active memory to process even mildly complex ideas and retain key outcomes in their long-term memory. One of the key triggers for disengagement is putting heavy demand on the learners’ memory.
6. Provide mentoring– and be innovative in giving them. Normative or prescriptive guides are known to elicit negative responses, especially in young learners. Instead use questions and illustrations to help the learner create their own guides. Top it with some good practices that make the concept easily usable.
7. Ensure progress – and keep a progress mindset as it would keep the focus of the learners in attaining the outcomes and goals. The aspect of progress includes completion of the components, participating and contributing to the activities and adherence to the prescribed timelines. Incentives, value propositions and continuing relevance of the outcomes are known to ensure progress.
8. Elicit performance – and be mindful that it is a continuous process and needs to be addressed as a constant in the session. While preparing for a session, it is important to keep asking the performance question. The idea of performance easily links to the higher order thinking components in the blooms taxonomy.
9. Provide feedback – that are constructive and insightful for the learners as it offers three critical assurances – engagement, alignment and goals attainment. Besides the basic ideas of timely, specific, honest and mindful; the feedback should be about the future, the process (or approach) and actionable.
10. Assure learning – which translates to demonstrating, through multiple processes, that learners achieve what they expected by completing all the components of the program is the true culmination of any learning engagement. This needs to get into more innovative assessment and go into the domain of learner’s free expression of their achieving their bigger goals.
While most facilitators would be following/practicing some of the points shared above, it is important to take a moment and reflect upon these as a mindset. The ideas of gaining attention, stimulating recall, engaging content, memory limitations, mentoring, ensuring progress and performance and assuring learning combine to create a two way imperative for a facilitator. Remember – teaching is the best way to learn, but facilitating your own learning, goes a step beyond this adage. To be an effective facilitator, one truly needs to be an effective learner.
Learning is a very delicate idea and helping someone else to learn adds a few new dimensions of challenges to it. To start with, we all assume that we know how to learn. It might be possible for us to pick some of the simple intuitive actions and ideas by just aping our environment, but we need a through grounding to learn with explicit progress. A true adult learner should have three simple capability – to come up with an original idea, connect it with reality and see through its implications.
gly counter-intuitive aspect of learning. Is learning logical? I have seen most natural response to be – of course. But if we look at the idea a bit deeper, you might begin to doubt your intuition. Learning is a paradox. The famous Meno’s paradox given by Plato explains this beautifully. Simply put it says “you can’t learn anything that you don’t already know”. If this is true, then is the idea of facilitation futile? On the contrary the sooner a learning facilitator recognises this anomaly, more effective are her efforts to help learners. Why so? Because you now have a necessary precondition – start from what is known, to be able to deliver the intended outcomes.
e are ready to move to an abstract level. Have you thought of a metaphor for learning? Some of the common ones include a light bulb, a flame or even a flash of light. They usually represent the visibility associated with the knowledge that learning gives. Another way to understand learning is to think of learning as a metaphor. Why so? because, here we look at learning as an outcome itself rather than it being an intermediary leading to another (possibly more important) outcome. As a learning facilitator, your role is limited to delivering the first outcome. It’s important to realise our own scope of control and the true promise we can make to a learner. So, if we look at learning as a metaphor, what do you think this metaphor represents? There could be multiple answers to this question and some I can offer are evolution, destruction, progress and possibly the simplest one – change. Change is the most fundamental and necessary precursor to learning and hence a powerful idea that learning could be a metaphor for.
The preceding two thoughts aligns one to the idea of facilitation in contrast to teaching. If you are still wearing the teaching hat, you might want to ask yourself one simple question – Do I really have all the answers? Or, more importantly, is it enough to just have answers addressing the current needs? If we know the question, post fact we most certainly know the correct answers. However, if we start with an answer, how certain are we that we will know the question. If you remember Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you know 42 doesn’t reveal much. Now ask this question to yourself as a facilitator – To learn, is it more effective to help a learner ask right questions to unravel the future thus enabling each question to lead to a more powerful question digging deeper or just giving them a simple answer of how you see the future to be? This brings us to the next challenge a facilitator needs to overcome – Do I give the answers or build the capability to ask questions?
The idea of learning as a skill is greatly supported by the idea that questions help one learn. While an answer could be right or wrong, it carries the ego of the person giving the answer, it is contextual and laden with assumptions, and most critically it comes with an expiry date. Answers are not poor or unimportant or even marginal in value, just that questions help learners to learn better. As a facilitator, it is important that you make learners dig deep into their own realm of knowledge and understanding and ask questions. Noel Burch of Gordon Training International (GTI) gave us a very powerful framework to understand our learning process – four stages for learning any new skill as depicted in the figure. It is an important idea to recognise that facilitation is primarily a play between levels 2 and 3 – the idea that learning is triggered by getting conscious of an incompetence as a vulnerability. It is also an equally important realization that awareness precedes learning. Embedded in this realization is the fact that, awareness leads to questions.
You are a learning facilitator and not an expert who is expected to know it all. You don’t help a learner to learn by giving precious pearls of wisdom from your all-encompassing knowledgebase. In the modern context, there are many sources right from google to AI assistants and so on which can act as the knowledge repository with more currency and ease. So, is the age of teaching dead? In the adult learning space, it has been dead for a while now. Our attempts to flog this dead horse has been giving us horrible results in terms of little or no relevancy of the graduates to the modern tasks, roles, and career paths. Unemployable graduates are a hard reality hitting the global job market for a long time now. Being a facilitator is possibly the new avatar every teacher need to transition into. The natural realization of this act would be that no one’s learning is ever complete.
It is not just that our learning is transient, even our need to learn anything specific is. The only enduring aspect is our motivation to keep learning. For this to happen, it is important that we develop our own basis, synthesis, inferences, and the resulting conviction. YouTube has a piece of a 
Looking at the 5 Learning as a Facilitator Thought Points, you might have recognised a virtuous learning cycle that it creates. You start by recognising learning to be a counter-intuitive. You can only learn things you already know. And you do this by bringing a change, thus be open to giving up what you already know. This is learning to start with. Change is an outcome of recognising vulnerability and asking questions to address it. The more questions you ask the more you learn. When you learn, you can help others to learn. And the cycle repeats infinitely. I call this the “Spiral of learning as a facilitator.”