Facilitator--One Who Makes Things Easier. Difficultator--One Who...?

I've been wrestling with the skill of facilitation lately--thinking about how we teach it in the dorms/barracks for student leaders, in the classroom for students, and in meetings for adults.

I've been geeking out on etymology, too. So look up "facilitate" in the Online Etymology Dictionary, and you'll see that it has the stem of "facil" (easy)  and "facere" (do). So to make something easy. Facilitating a conversation? The facilitator's role is to make that conversation easy. My best friend doesn't like the term. If teachers are facilitators, then our role isn't to make things easy. It's to make things more difficult. She coined the term "Difficultator." I like it. I can't quite sell it yet, but I'm filing it away with my daughter's term, "detorial" (the detour you take when a student question pops up during a lesson, and you go off script to "tutor" them in that moment).

In the dorms and barracks for student leaders...
Several years ago (I can't remember how many because it was so awful that I long blocked the experience out of my mind), I was invited to be an adult guest in a student-facilitated meeting. I was told it was "an honor" to be invited, so I accepted the invitation. When I arrived at the meeting, I wasn't offered a seat; I was waved over to the corner. The girls in the room went around and introduced themselves to each other. They skipped me. When it got to the meat of the meeting, I was never invited into the conversation. And frankly, they weren't facilitating well. And then when they handed out cookies, they skipped me. That was the last straw. It took me years to accept another invitation to a student-facilitated meeting.

Fast forward to my second go-round at Culver. Our mission: "Culver educates its students for leadership and responsible citizenship..." I have thought about that bad meeting many times in my encounters with student leaders. When I returned back to Culver, I started thinking, also, about the phrase, "When we knew better, we did better." I think we can do better with not just giving our students opportunities to lead, but also giving them feedback on that leadership so that they can grow their skills.

This August, I gave a facilitation workshop for the CGA Seniors. I had all 90 or so (I feel like there were more?) CGA Seniors in the room, and I told them the story of that really bad meeting. And I told them that they would be facilitating meetings during their senior year. And I told them that I was there to help them to not facilitate really bad meetings.

I kicked off with some core beliefs about facilitation:
1. It’s not about me. (Even if it feels like it is.)
2. Facilitation is a complex skill, and it is difficult to get it right no matter how often you do it.
3. There isn’t one right way to facilitate, and there are a lot of wrong ways.
4. Good and bad meetings happen; talking about them productively is where facilitator growth happens.

And then I shared my four keys to backwards design of a facilitation experience:
1. What do we want the outcome to be? (head and heart)
2. What do we need to do to get it there? (the plan)
3. How will we know if the plan is working? And how will we make adjustments if it isn’t working? (accountability)
4. What will we do when we are finished so we improve next time? (meta feedback)

And we focused on the fourth one for this meeting; our focus became about figuring out what a "good" meeting might include so that we can then get feedback to improve for next time. The thing is, students know what they like in a meeting. We all actually know what we like in a meeting. So I asked them to do a "norm-setting" exercise, but I framed it around meetings. If you are in a meeting, what do you want/need from a facilitator?

Groups came up with a list of traits on their own (I asked them to first write individually and then to pare that list down to get it to a manageable number). And those were to become their facilitation targets for the year.

I shared with them this list of facilitation targets in case they didn't already have a full list:

• Develop meaningful agendas
• Communicate “why” of the meeting
• Give effective directions 
• Engage every participant 
• Manage group energy
• Control dominant participants
• Show courage
• Actively listen
• Model expected behaviors
• Have a sense of humor
• Refocus when the group gets off track

But the groups already had a number of these on their lists.

And then I sent them off with these three charges for the class of 2019:
1. Grow your facilitation skills this year.
2. Have more “good meetings” than “bad ones.”
3. Good or bad: Seek out/give feedback on facilitation.

Looking forward to checking in to see how they are doing.

As a leadership opportunity in the classroom...
But I've also been thinking about facilitation in the classroom. So often, I put students into groups and ask them to work together; sometimes I give them roles in those groups. But seldom do I take the opportunity to develop them as facilitators in those moments. (Telling a student they are the "leader" isn't the same as teaching them how to facilitate.)

This one is still very much in development for me, but I'm working on it with the students in my Humanities 10 class right now.

Our course has this goal: Students will speak to communicate and collaborate confidently, deliberately, and articulately in a variety of environments.

So the "collaborate confidently" part intrigues me as does the "variety of environments." The bite I'm going to take out of this course goal has to do with facilitation as collaboration, so I'm going to work on this with my students.

Instead of assigning group roles when I last put my students into groups, I assigned one role: facilitator. Everyone else? Participants. I had an assignment that was broken into four parts. And I had groups of four. So each student was charged with facilitating their part of the conversation; I assigned the order for the facilitators so that I could keep track of who was supposed to be facilitating at any given time.

The three groups of four students were at tables in three of the corners of the room (my classes are small, so I technically had three facilitators working at a time), and I put my chair in the center of those groups. And then I listened and took notes on the facilitation.

I noted moments like "connects two participants' ideas together" or "answers the question herself instead of asking the question of group" or  "redirects conversation to get it back on topic" or "missed opportunity to invite comment from participant A." And when students finished covering the content in their small groups, I shared my facilitation observations with  the individual groups. And then we had a whole-class conversation to fill in any gaps on the content of the conversations.

It's a start. I think the next step is to take those comments and turn them into a frame for their next facilitated conversations. So those notes from last time will become a front-end conversation about the skill of facilitation and what they are trying to practice. At some point, I imagine this might end up in a more formal (formative/summative?) feedback mechanism, but I'm not sure what that is right now.

It feels like this might be the "right bite" for the sophomore speaking goal--can we help turn our student "participants" into effective student leader "facilitators?"

As facilitation relates to norms (meetings for adults)...
I wrote earlier about fine-tuning some thinking on norm setting. After actually going through a norm setting exercise with the teaching team I'm on last year, I reflected on some of the "norms" that were suggested by the team, and they just didn't seem to fit in the category of "group norms." They felt more like calls to a facilitator. And we have a number of different people facilitating conversations at our level, so we decided to separate the two sets of norms out.

We have these "facilitator norms" for the Humanities 10 team:
• Respect beginning/ending time
• Define targets: discussion, dialogue, decision-making?
• Create space for contributions from the room—avoid the ping pong
• Thoughtfully plan agendas + learning/working groups
• Be open to feedback on facilitation

And these "meeting norms":
• Be prepared
• Be present
      o        minimize distractions, listen actively
      o be mindful of air time—taking too much or too little
      o allow ideas to simmer
• Own group decisions
• Assume good intentions

And a final note

There is plenty of literature out there on holding better meetings. And there are plenty of people who complain a lot about having meetings. I'm really interested in both having better meetings and having people who don't complain about having meetings. That's the reason for the wrestle--how can we not just fine-tune our own facilitation skills but also support the development of other facilitators? 

_Reader, Come Home_: Nurturing the Reading Brain

Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf sucked me in with just the blurb on the jacket: "[This author] considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection  as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies."

Critical thinking?
Empathy?
Reflection?
and READING?
Sign me up.

I was primed to love this text from the start, and then I read the first letter (the book is written in the form of an epistolary with each letter beginning with "Dear Reader.") The author makes some huge promises in the opening letter, and I can't wait to see how she delivers on them. Here is an excerpt:

        All these letters will prepare you, my reader, to consider the many critical issues involved, beginning with yourself. In the last letter I ask you to think about who the true "good readers" are in our changing epoch and to reflect for yourself on the immeasurably important role they play in a democratic society--never more so than now. Within these pages the meanings of a good reader have little to do with how well anyone decodes words; they have everything to do with being faithful to what Proust once describes as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one's own.
        There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader. [The good] reader—like the good society—embodies each of Aristotle’s three lives, even as the third life, the life of contemplation, is daily threatened in our culture. From the perspectives of neuroscience, literature, and human development, I will argue that it is this form of reading that is our best chance at giving the next generation the foundation for the unique and autonomous life of the mind they will need in a world none of us can fully imagine.  The expansive, encompassing processes that underlie insight and reflection in the present reading brain represent our best complement and antidote to the cognitive and emotional changes that are the sequelae of the multiple, life-enhancing achievements of a digital age. 

…I will suggest that the future of the human species can best sustain and pass on the highest forms of our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom by nurturing and protecting the contemplative dimension of the reading brain. (12-13) 

This passage alone raises an incredible number of questions for me as an educator and a teacher of reading. What's my role in cultivating "good readers?" How does that play out in my everyday practices as a teacher? How do I encourage my students to go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover their own wisdom? And, perhaps most importantly, how does the school climate where I'm teaching support lives that propel and sustain our students' becoming "good readers?" 

We're particularly challenged, as educators, by this concept of creating a life of contemplation for our students. There are timelines and deadlines and curriculum maps that all seem to propel us forward, but they don't necessarily give us the time and space for a "contemplative life." Gotta get to this chapter by this point in time so that I can get them through this material and have them read this next thing... (wording intentionally vague). It's not solely the system that forces this kind of thinking--it's also certainly the autonomous choices I make in my classroom to move on. 

The word that seemed to stick with me the most here was "nurturing." While trying to highlight all the details of our current book, I wonder if my pace, my checks for understanding, my trying to dial into the minds of my students during the receptive skill of reading is really nurturing their brains. I hope so, but I wonder... 

I'm guessing I'll be back with more references to this text. In the meantime, I'm off to nurture the contemplative dimension of my reading brain through some off-screen time. 

Eye in the Sky--360 Cameras and Classrooms--The "after" and the learning

It's been nearly a month since I returned from from NYC and the Teaching Institute at Spence (TiAS); school has started, kids are in my seats again, and I'm trying to get myself into the rhythm of a new school year. I went back and read my previous post on the vulnerability of taping classes and posting them for the world to see pre-Spence experience; you can see my thinking here. My sense and thinking post-Spence is exactly what it should be after a profound professional development experience--dramatically evolved from what it was a month ago.

Feeling empowered--the curating of the videos
The fantastic facilitators of the TIaS watched the submitted videos of the participants before we arrived, and they curated the videos for us. Yes, we were going to look at our teaching, but we were going to dial in on a five-minute segment of our class, not the entire eighty five minutes. When it came time to look at our videos, the facilitators suggested that we zero in on one of the three segments they selected, but they also allowed us time and space to choose our own segment if those curated segments didn't speak to us. That felt incredibly empowering.

Feeling empowered again--creating a question of practice and a protocol to unpack the question
The TIaS facilitators also empowered us to design our own question of practice. I am really interested in how I talk with students about their engagement in the class and how we measure engagement, so I asked a question of my practice: how can I more effectively measure student engagement and communicate with them about that engagement so that they can grow?
From that question of practice, I developed a rubric I thought I might be able to use in my classes this fall. Then I developed a protocol to tune the rubric. Then I asked my fellow Institute goers to participate in the protocol to tune the rubric while we watched a segment of my class.

Takeaways to Take Forward
The biggest surprise for me (and something I wasn't even thinking of before I went); I don't have to watch the entire class to learn something about my teaching. A lot can be gained from focusing on just five minutes of a class.

There is incredible power in allowing an observation or taping of class to come from a personal question of practice. While I have had several administrators ask me, "What would you like me to look for?", that somehow isn't the same as getting to develop the question myself about a targeted segment of a class that is on tape, one that can be rewound and reviewed and reconsidered.

That everyone has some skin in the game matters, too. At TIaS, we had a small community of teachers who spent their week building trust and developing a common sense of both vulnerability and support. When I was partnered with other teachers, and I opened my classroom to them, and they opened their classrooms to me, we were able to have a great balance of inquiry and reflection, a sincere desire to lift up one another’s practice while also tuning it, and incredible care taken in giving each other feedback. I wonder if observations would feel differently (better?) if the observer would become the observed in a reciprocal, collaborative arrangement. 

Protocols help democratize conversations, but they can also feel constraining to participants. Finding the right balance between the use of a protocol and a time for "open coaching" helps to honor both modes of discussion. 


Finally, I said multiple times during the week that I feel more and more like teaching is brutifully messy work, and when we try to clean it up (through observations, protocols, curriculum development), we make it even messier. I'm reminded of all the times I try to clean up a quarter-sized drop of paint, and that quarter-sized drop suddenly becomes a foot-long smear on the hardwood. Perhaps I've taken the metaphor a bit far. Anyway, the messiness and the struggle to clean it up is where growth happens. My favorite norm for our week together at Spence--embrace each other's messiness.  ·