Unit 2
Learning Facilitation
Unit 2 (Week 2)
Thursday, Sept. 16 - Wednesday, Sept. 22
Things to do this week…
- Meet in Zoom [badge label=“Thursday, September 16 - 11:30 AM PDT” url=“https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=LDRS+663+Meeting&iso=20210916T1130&p1=1109&ah=1&am=30”” /]
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Read Facilitating Learning and Change in Groups
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Read What is a Group?
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Read Comfort Zone to Performance Management
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Read Core Competencies
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Watch Liberating Structures
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Visit What, So What, Now What? W³
:fa-check: Please complete these items by [badge label=“Wednesday, September 22” url=“https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=LDRS+663+Meeting&iso=20210916T1130&p1=1109&ah=1&am=30”” /]
- Your Small Group Facilitation Session is due [badge label=“Monday, Oct. 4” /]. Please begin scheduling your facilitation sessions with your groups this week so you have enough time to complete the sessions and your reflections. ### Overview
Facilitation in education refers to the process of helping learners to explore, learn and change. A facilitator is expert on process and group interactions. In education, facilitation is rooted in understanding the nature of the social learning process and how to guide its direction and quality. As a social species, we learn a great deal from each other in both formal and informal contexts. Our earliest learning experiences are profoundly social and intimate interactions between mother and child, and the social aspect of learning never ceases to be important. During this unit, we will examine a short history of social theories of learning from John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, then, we will experiment with the theory and practices of facilitating learning in group settings.
Topics
This unit is divided into the following topics:
- Social Theories of Learning
- Cooperative Learning
- Facilitating Transformational Learning in Group Settings
- Navigating Group Dynamics
- Core Facilitation Competencies
- Strategies for Learning Facilitation
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit, you should be able to:
- Explain how to design learning environments to maximize learning
- Plan appropriate group learning processes to support transformative learning.
- Demonstrate how to facilitate a course of study.
- Design cooperative activities to maximize student-student and student-content interactions
- Apply knowledge of the Community of Inquiry model liberating structures to the facilitation of cooperative learning activities
- Identify and explain core competencies for facilitating learning.
Topic 2 - Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning is a set of learning facilitation strategies that are focused on encouraging educative social interactions between learners. It is important to not conflate cooperative learning with group projects as you might remember them from your previous experiences as a university student. Group projects are often assigned because faculty seem to have a sense that working together is a good thing for students, along with a vague sense that modern jobs all require teamwork. Too often, they amount to repurposing an individual assignment (such as, a research paper) into the same task, but with multiple people handing in one item instead of three to four. When these tasks are not well structured, the process becomes problematic.
We have all likely experienced less-than-ideal group projects where one or two people do most of the work, one member is seemingly absent altogether, and another’s work is of poor quality. This is not the kind of learning activity that inspires highly engaged learners.
Contrary to this dysfunctional group learning model, cooperative learning is structured in a way that maximizes effort from all students and, ideally, leads to all group members attaining high-level learning outcomes. In order to ensure this, there are five characteristics of learning groups that must be present for cooperative learning to occur: “positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interactions, appropriate use of social skills, and group processing” (Johnson & Johnson, 2009, p. 366).
0.0.2.1 More about cooperative learning…
0.0.2.1.1 Positive Interdependence
Positive interdependence, according to Johnson and Johnson is the idea that individuals in a learning environment are dependent upon each other for success. In other words, I cannot succeed unless you succeed and you cannot succeed unless I succeed. So, collectively, we are interdependent. Positive interdependence is the key that distinguishes cooperative learning from competitive learning, where students are graded on a curve and only the top 2-3% of students can earn ‘A’ grades.
0.0.2.1.2 Individual and Group Accountability
In cooperative learning environments, each individual in the group is held accountable for their contributions to the final product, and feedback is provided to both the individual and the group. This helps to ensure that students who need more assistance are identified and can be supported as needed, and it also prevents the ‘social loafing’ that is common in typical ‘group projects.’
0.0.2.1.3 Promotive Interaction
Promotive interaction is the logistics of working and learning together as a cooperative group. The essence is that group members each need to work to promote the learning of each other member of the group. Since each person will be held accountable for their work and the entire group will only succeed if each member succeeds, there is a natural social pressure on more experienced members of the group to assist those with less experience or knowledge.
0.0.2.1.4 Interpersonal Skills
Not only do members of the group need to learn the content of the lesson or project, but they must also learn the process of working well as a cooperative group. Sometimes, these processes need to be taught directly, other times (like in graduate studies) it is reasonable to presume that group members will already possess and be willing to utilize effective social skills.
Learning Activity
- Questions to Consider
- After reading through the content in Topic 2, please consider the following questions:
- How can coaching concepts be applied to helping learners learn?
- What key characteristics define effective coaching for learning?
- How can educators coach learners through the transition of making a change?
0.1 Topic 3 - Facilitating Transformational Learning in Group Environments
In Unit One, we examined the CoI model and identified how teaching presence helps to support both the cognitive and social presences within the educational experience of a course of study. An important idea we emphasized was that teaching presence can be a shared function between members of the learning community and that facilitation of the learning process is often shared (Garrison, et al., 2010). Now, we are interested in examining what a division of the teaching presence might look like if we professionalize the function of learning facilitation within a distributed model of teaching presence.
Our prototype for exploring this model is TWU’s own Facilitated Academic Resource (FAR) centre. The facilitation of courses in the TWU FAR Centre model is unique, as you know. From the perspective of a traditional, campus-based faculty member in Langley, a FAR Centre course is an online course. The faculty member has worked in the role subject matter expert with an instructional designer to structure a course which integrates everything required to create an online community of inquiry with allowances for all three presences: social, cognitive, and teaching. The courses are deployed through online technology and materials are accessed digitally in remote locations. Furthermore, students submit their work to the faculty member who then assesses their work and provides both formative and summative feedback as appropriate.
From the perspective of the remote student, however, the course is much more like a typical F2F course where they are meeting with a group of their fellow students in regularly scheduled learning labs in a central location and are guided through the learning materials by an experienced facilitator.
The rationale for this model is that international students often experience difficulties completing online courses from Western universities, so TWU is providing a F2F Academic Facilitator to support remote students in their individual and group studies through the courses. You, as the Academic Facilitation Specialist, are a critical component of this model. Your skills in coaching facilitating student learning through courses where you may not be a subject matter expert are going to be extremely important.
As such, you will need to start thinking about how to facilitate your students’ experience of a course of study’s learning activities without the immediate F2F presence of a faculty member. In the activity below, you will read about the concept and practices of facilitating transformation learning.
Facilitating Group Learning Sessions
The work of facilitating the learning process within a group setting begins with an effective plan. Smith (2009) proposes a simple model: EFFECT. This model reminds the facilitator to think about the learning environment, the focus (or purpose) of the session, feelings the session is likely to evoke, experiences learners will explore, changes learners will make as a result of the session, and the timings allocated for all the learning experiences and activities. Next, it’s important for the facilitator to plan out the structure of each learning session, which like a story, should have beginnings, middles, and endings. Each stage has a particular task. The beginning encourages learners to explore, the middle engages learners with the subject, and the ending enables learners to move on in their personal learning journey. Drawing upon Evans’ (2007) guidelines for helping conversations, Smith (2009) advises facilitators to think about “the exploration as the first quarter of the session; engaging with the subject and developing understanding as the middle half; and enabling action and development as the final quarter.”
- Learning Activity
- Read and Reflect
Read the following article:
Questions to Consider
After completing the reading above, consider the following questions:
According to Roger Schwarz what is a facilitator’s main task?
According to Carl Rogers what are the core conditions for facilitating learning?
What are the three foci of the facilitator role?
What are the core values informing facilitation?
How can the EFFECT model help you to plan a facilitated learning session?
How does a facilitator effectively structure a facilitated learning session?
- Learning Activity
### - Read and Reflect{-}
Take a moment to read the following article:
Questions to Consider
After reading the article above, consider the following questions:
What are some of the key benefits and dangers of learning in group settings?
What are some key dimensions of groups?
What are the stages of group development?
- Learning Activity
### - Read and Reflect{-}
Take a moment to read the following article:
Questions to Consider
After completing the reading above, consider the following questions:
How is White’s Optimal Performance Zone similar Vygotsky’s ZPD?
How does White’s model help a facilitator determine how to adjust their facilitation strategies?
What insight does White’s model provide about how to sustain learning performance?
Topic 5 - Core Facilitation Competencies
The professionalization of learning facilitation within educational settings is a promising, but new development. The core competencies are still emerging, as institutions begin to prototype this model. Below is a tentative list of competencies we have identified through in our preliminary experiments.
- Develop multi-session study plans for completing courses
- Select clear study methods and learning activities
- Prepare time and space to support group learning
- Create and sustain a participatory transformative learning environment
- Guide Group to meet each course learning outcome
- Directing processes for sharing peer feedback (in self-directed learning)
- Providing learners with formative feedback
- Mediating exchange of coursework and feedback between students & instructor
- Learning Activity
### - Read and Reflect{-}
Take some time to read the following article:
Questions to Consider
After completing the reading above, consider the following questions:
What general facilitation competencies apply to facilitating learning?
What competencies do you feel are strength areas? What areas do you need to develop?
How can facilitation skills help you support learner success in an educational setting?
Topic 6 - Facilitation Strategies
Strategies for facilitating learning are as numerous and varied as the educators who create them. In the FAR model of professionally facilitated learning we are proposing in this course, each FAR course you may help facilitate in the future has a facilitator’s guide that provides designs for each learning activity. While these designs provide you with the majority of the learning facilitation strategies required in a given course, the needs of learners are not always predictable and emergent strategies may be needed.
Liberating Structures
It can often be challenging to devise new ways of interacting in F2F learning environments, but there are many resources available to facilitators both online and in print. One of those resources is a book and website called Liberating Structures which describes a set of 33 structured activities that you can use in your learning labs to generate conversation without resorting to the same old tired ‘brainstorm.’
- Learning Activity
### - Watch and Reflect{-}
Watch the video below for a quick introduction to Liberating Structures:
Next, visit the Liberating Structures website and take a look at the following activity:
Now, consider how could you use this Liberating Structure to guide a group discussion that would help learners learn a Unit?
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Unit 2 Assessment
Please see the details for Post 1 below for your first required reflective post.
In addition, you should be planning your Curriculum analysis assignment with your learning pod.
Checking Your Learning
Before you move on to the next unit, you may want to check to make sure that you are able to:
:fa-check: Explain how to design learning environments to maximize learning.
:fa-check: Plan appropriate group learning processes to support transformative learning.
:fa-check: Demonstrate how to facilitate a course of study.
:fa-check: Design cooperative activities to maximize student-student and student-content interactions.
:fa-check: Apply knowledge of the Community of Inquiry model and liberating structures to the facilitation of cooperative learning activities.
:fa-check: Identify and explain core competencies for facilitating learning.