Helping educators grow professionally is all about good teaching. That may seem obvious, but as Dennis Sparks writes in a recent blog post, we seldom hear individuals who offer professional development referred to as “teachers.” Instead, says the retired executive director of the National Staff Development Council (now called “Learning Forward”), we’re more likely to hear them described as “presenters” or “speakers” or even “trainers.” He writes:
A speaker or presenter’s job seems to be, well, presenting information—as in “This is the content I will be delivering in this session”—rather than ensuring learning. That’s probably why I cringe a bit inside each time I am introduced as a “presenter.” I once asked a group, “If I am your presenter, then what are you?” They responded, almost as one, “The audience.” No one said, “Your students.”
Dennis concedes that brief speeches and presentations can have value when they provide “a sense of direction and provide inspiration to the school community,” or help educators decide “where they want to invest time and resources to achieve important goals.”
But with few exceptions, presentations—because of their typically brief and superficial nature—do not change beliefs, create deep understanding, or cultivate new habits of mind or behavior because they are seldom truly intended to achieve those ends. [But] if those are the expressed purposes of a “presentation,” let’s then call it what it is—teaching.
In our professional development outreach at the Best Practices Center, we always identify ourselves as “facilitators.” And I definitely see that role as also part of a classroom teacher’s job description as she or he works with students. I wondered what Dennis might think. In a comment on his post, I wrote in part:
Effective facilitation, to me, requires skills, knowledge, and the ability to listen. Effective facilitators constantly adapt based on the feedback they receive. They work hard before the session to ensure they are well-prepared.
I’m interested in hearing more about your views on the term “facilitator.” Seems to me that it should be a higher-order skill, right along there with effective teaching.
Here’s what Dennis had to say:
This is how I think about it, Cathy… Facilitation is a subset of good teaching. There are times for teachers to “present,” but we don’t want teachers’ talk to fill classrooms. There are also times when we want teachers to design and lead activities through which students have valuable experiences and engage in conversations primarily with one another, not the teacher. I think of that as facilitation, or at least one manifestation of it.
What about you? How would you define the role of “facilitator” in the classroom or in a professional development setting? And picking up on another theme in Dennis’s post: What behaviors should we expect (and promote) among those being “facilitated”?
