"Facilitators" Or "Guides On The Side"? No Thanks

How's this for a radical proposition: teachers should, erm, teach

Feb 04, 2023

Photo by Parabol | The Agile Meeting Toolbox on Unsplash

Introduction

confused, by Terry Freedman — What happens when a “facilitator” is asked a difficult question by a student: Eh? (Drawing by Terry Freedman)

Much of this essay is based on my experience of education in England, specifically in the fields of Economics, ICT (Information and Communications Technology), and Computing . However, I do think that the points raised are more widely applicable. I hope you will let me know what you think in the comments.

So much is written these days about the role of the teacher being to “facilitate”, to be the “guide on the side”. When the Computing Programme of Study was introduced in England, some people seriously suggested that the lack of suitably qualified teachers (i.e. not able to understand computing concepts or to do computer programming) was not a problem because classes could have “facilitators” instead.

It seems to me that we have thrown the baby out with the bath water. The days when it was acceptable for a teacher to stand at the front of the class and bore the kids into submission are long gone. (I’m not saying that the practice itself is long gone – unfortunately, that is not the case – just that it is no longer an acceptable practice.)

What Is The Role Of A Teacher?

The main role of a teacher is, surely, to teach – a proposition that probably marks me out as a radical. Anyone can stand in front of a group of people and talk, even if they have to take Rescue Remedy in order to steel their nerves. Anybody can act as the guide on the side as long as they have a reasonable amount of common-sense and have taken the trouble to find out what the activity and its purpose are. But teaching is a lot more than both of these extremes. It involves understanding what has not been said, asking probing questions, acting as a conductor of the orchestra that is the classroom and its inhabitants, ensuring that not only that everyone is making progress, but that each person is making the best progress they can. That takes expertise.

I have to say, in my opinion the perception of the role of the teacher as a figure of authority applies across the board, or should do. A couple of years ago, a headteacher in the UK informed pupils that Black History Month started as Negro History Week. Predictably, the kids protested against the use of an offensive word, and the headteacher issued an apology. Surely the correct response would have been to have informed them that facts are facts, and that if they couldn’t accept that perhaps they should go to a school where facts don’t matter. It would have also been a useful lesson in civic duty, that of accepting that there are facts that we may not like but which exist nonetheless: the universe doesn’t revolve around us. It’s happening everywhere in every context: kids get offended over the statement of a fact or an opinion , and the people who are supposed to be the adults in the room apologise.

Are Teachers Merely Content Deliverers?

Does not the relegation of the role of the teacher to guide on the side effectively turn them into deliverers of content rather than creators of learning experiences? Once you really believe that the role of the teacher is to be nothing more than a facilitator, you are not many steps away from fully scripted lessons that could be delivered by anybody.

Do We Even Need Teachers?

Even lessons that are less than 100% scripted are, one might argue, unacceptable. Take the old and now much-disparaged erstwhile Qualification and Curriculum Authority’s Sample ICT Units to bring a previous incarnation of the National Curriculum to life. The idea of these was to enable non-ICT experts to deliver competent ICT lessons. As such, they were well-intentioned and, as a short-term measure, probably a good idea. The trouble is, though, once you have something like that in place it tends to take on a life of its own. My own experience of the Key Stage 3 Units of Work is that if you deviated from the prescribed lesson plan and methodology you had to be prepared to justify yourself, especially to Ofsted1 inspectors2.

In fairness, I have been informed that this wasn’t uniformly the case everywhere in the country, but in a sense that isn’t even the point: once you have units of work, lesson plans and resources handed to you on a plate, you really don’t need to be an expert. In fact, you don’t even need to be a teacher. The resources are created by people who have never and may never set foot in your classroom; all you are required to do is deliver the “package”. I’m not saying the resources were not good – they were. I’m not saying they were not well-intentioned – they were. I’m not even saying they were not useful – they were. What I am saying is that we need to be careful and wary of any process which turns experts into mere mediators.

When it comes to promulgating the benefits of the “guide on the side” approach, people need to be careful: they may get what they wish for.

Facilitators? Don’t Make Me Laugh

When did this happen? When did Computing teachers stop becoming teachers and become “facilitators” instead? I’ve largely managed to ignore this sort of nonsense but now it’s getting out of hand. Some years ago someone said on Twitter or Facebook that he was an ‘active facilitator’, while someone else shared a sign which read “I am not a teacher; I am an activator.”

Eh?

Let’s examine these terms.

Facilitator

I once acted as a facilitator for an in-service training session. A group of teachers from a local school had been given the option of having half a day’s training out of school regarding the setting up of their departments’ areas of the school website.

I reckoned that what they needed was not training as such, but a day out of school where they could get on with what they had to do without being interrupted by children, bells, or being hauled off to cover the lesson of an absent colleague. So what I did was provide them with a room with computers and internet access, and myself to answer any education-related questions that might arise, and a technician to answer any technical questions which might come up.

The feedback we received on the evaluation forms was that it was the best training session they had ever attended. But there were special circumstances:

It wasn’t really a training session, just an opportunity for some teachers to have the time they needed to get on with the task, with access to expert help if they needed it.
They weren’t following a course: they were not expected to have learnt anything specific by the end of the session.
They were adults.

If you’re meant to be teaching children and ensure they learn a certain number of specific things by the end of the course, how can you do so by being a mere facilitator?

One answer that people come up with is that pupils can learn from each other, i.e. peer-learning is facilitated. But unless peer-learning is organised really well, it does more harm than good. Why? Because they can reinforce each other’s misunderstandings. Peer-learning only works where pupils are organised in such a way that a pupil who has mastered a particular concept or skill is able to help others who haven’t.

For example, in a cross-school multimedia project I was involved in, one pupil became the ‘go-to person’ for video animation in his classroom. If anyone had a problem with it, he would help them out. That was peer-learning which actually worked.

As for the people who suggest that students learning computing (or any other subject) could be served by “facilitators”, I have two questions for them:

1. Would you like to have your house rewired by an electrician who wasn’t taught, but “facilitated”?

2. Did your education consist of being “facilitated”? If not, why do you think it’s acceptable to potentially damage the education and life chances of today’s students?

Active Facilitator

I have no idea what this is. Presumably an ordinary facilitator just throws open the doors of the classroom and lets the kids get on with it, while an active facilitator tries to give them some guidance. I suppose if an active facilitator were sufficiently active you could refer to them as a ‘teacher’.

Activator

OK, I give up. It sounds like someone who walks around the classroom with a cattle prod to keep the kids awake.

Why Has This Nonsense Arisen?

I think it has emerged from a number of propositions, which I will consider in turn.

“Young People Are Familiar With Technology”

I think this is a red herring. For a start, I am not convinced it’s true, except on a superficial level, as I think is apparent from my earlier comments.

The Kids Know More About This Than I Do

This is a more extreme version of the one above. Quite frankly, I think it’s an appalling admission. I have been asked to teach subjects at very short notice, and in some cases I was only one lesson ahead of the pupils. But the operative word in that sentence is “ahead”. You should always know more about the concept you’re dealing with at the time you’re dealing with it.

I remember an Ofsted inspector giving a talk to teachers in which he said, laughing, that he doesn’t understand computers. He always asks his ten year-old daughter to help him out. Does he need his ten year-old daughter to help him work out the cost of his shopping, or to read the newspaper? Why did he deem it acceptable to not just know nothing about computing, but to actually seem proud of the fact? If that attitude is widespread, it's hardly surprising that some people in positions of influence behave as teaching involves little skill and even less knowledge?

In any case, even if it was objectively true that you didn’t know the subject well enough to disseminate knowledge about it, you’re the teacher. You should know how to check whether the pupils really understand the concept. Can they apply that understanding in a different context? Can they use it to solve problems? If they don’t understand something, how can you help them get to grips with it?

I have to say I have always been surprised when I’ve watched or attend a lecture by Sugatra Mita, who basically says that kids can teach themselves3. The source of surprise was not what he said, but the fact that he received a standing ovation for saying it. This is from an audience mainly consisting of teachers who would be made redundant if Mita’s ideas were widely adopted.

Being Self-Managing Is A 21st Century Skill

Pupils have to be taught or shown how to self-manage properly. Sometimes self-management means being able to listen to someone else talking without fiddling with a keyboard or staring at a phone. There are lots of facets of self-management, and just assuming that everyone can be an effective self-manager simply by the teacher’s doing nothing except letting them get on with it is ridiculous.

Pupils Should Be Able To Set Their Own Learning Goals

This is hailed as a new idea, but has actually been around for decades. It was especially prevalent in the 1970s in the context of adult education, and was known by the term “andragogy”. The idea was that people come to a class with their own experiences and ideas, and can be relied upon to decide for themselves what they would like to learn.

I once tried an experiment. I asked the people who attended the first session of the evening class I was running if they would like to choose the topics we should study, under the overall banner of “Understanding the Economy”. They came up with a few half-hearted ideas, but the majority view was that, as the expert, I had a better idea than they did of what was important for them to learn.

I’ve had experience of being facilitated both on a course I attended to learn how to do advanced programming, and on numerous in-service training courses. In the advanced programming course, I found the tutor’s attitude of setting some work and then doing nothing to help us achieve it was infuriating. Even the odd prompt over the shoulder now and again would have been helpful, but being a “facilitator” he was more content to sit watching the tennis on a television set in the room.

My experience of in-service training courses has been mostly that they are a waste of time. A so-called expert is brought in at vast expense to tell us what needs to be done. As soon as anyone asks, “But what should we do if a pupil does X?”, they say “That’s a great question. What do other people think?” Erm, excuse me, but I could have asked my colleagues in the staffroom and the school would have saved your huge fee.

What A Teacher Does

A good teacher, by which I mean one that understands what real teaching is, will do everything a so-called “facilitator” would do, and more.

They set up activities which are challenging, not quite within the pupils’ comfort zone, technically known as Vygotski’s zone of proximal development. For example, they will ask the pupils not just to program a turtle to move from point A to point B, but to build in code to deal with an unexpected event during its journey.
They set up activities which have an interesting context, and preferably with some potential real-world application.
They know enough to be able to answer pupils’ questions, at least when it comes to matters of fact. If a pupil says “How can I set up a series of ‘IF’ statements in a spreadsheet in a more efficient way?”, the teacher should be able to give a proper, ie implementable and useful, answer.
“Facilitating” is done as a technique to work in a particular context, not as an unthinking default position.
They will pair up pupils in such a way that an expert in one thing will help the non-expert – and changing the groupings for concepts/areas in which the expert and non-expert roles are different, perhaps even reversed.
Will ask difficult questions of the pupils, to move them on to the next level. For example, if a pupil has written a brilliant program, a good teacher will ask her how the interface could be made more user-friendly for use by non-programmers.
They will be highly critical, in a positive way of course, and not accept any old output. I have seen pupil videos in which the ‘background’ music is so loud that you can’t hear the commentary. That is poor editing and should have been dealt with before the video was released. That's what a real ICT or computing teacher would do. Similarly, a spreadsheet full of nested ‘IF’ statements which is so complicated that it’s all but impossible to look at it and work out what each element actually does should prompt a request to find a more user-friendly way of achieving the same result.
They have a bank of resources the pupils can refer to if they need to.
They actually teach the class for at least some parts of at least some lessons.
They set appropriate out-of-school work.
They assess what the pupils have done, not just rely on self-assessment or peer-assessment.
They understand how people learn. Quite frankly, anyone can be a facilitator: the school caretaker allowing you to run a computer club after school is a facilitator. A teacher needs to be more than that.
They enthuse and motivate pupils to learn more and achieve higher. That’s an active process, it’s not something that can be achieved by merely “facilitating”.

And so on.

It’s obvious from that list that some of the activities are a form of facilitation. In other words, the term “teacher” subsumes terms like “facilitator”. So here is my plea to those who feel the need to come with new job titles to replace 'teacher': grow up, get a grip, and take pride in being a member of the noble teaching profession!

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