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Teacher Facilitation Tools

In order to effect necessary changes, teachers must lead carefully. The job of the leader is not to make sure that a job gets done right, but as Warren Bennis says, an effective leader "makes sure we're doing the right things." Leaders don't manage; they facilitate in others the ability to manage themselves.

Facilitation is not an innate gift; rather, it is a learned skill. The profession of teaching gives teachers much experience in facilitation. By examining what has worked and what hasn't, teachers can take their facilitation experience and turn it into a skill that will help them to produce major changes in their schools and school systems.

Effective and Ineffective Facilitation Behaviors

Think back to some of your best days in the classroom. During those moments of flow, your students moved through the stages of cognitive dissonance easily, working their way from confusion to understanding with very little effort on your part. As teachers practice effective facilitation skills, these types of classroom experiences become more common. Within just a few years in the classroom, teachers have learned the difference between what works to facilitate learning, and what doesn't.

As you can see, many effective facilitation skills involve creating an environment of cooperative learning rather than a lecture-based environment. To be sure, the best facilitators do not stand in front of a group and disseminate information. Other, subtler skills are necessary, though, to encourage consensus. One of the most important roles of a facilitator is to bring a discussion that's gotten off topic back into focus. In order to help members of any group, whether students or colleagues, meet their objectives, skilled facilitators must also:

• Prioritize group discussions.
• Encourage decision-making.
• Promote consensus between group members.
• Set goals.
• Bring topics to a close.
• Draw conclusions from group discussions.

Using Disciplines of Schools That Learn as Facilitation Tools

As facilitators of school-wide change, teachers guide discussions around educational issues or problems so that individuals have an opportunity to contribute and to learn from each other, to examine problems, and make informed decisions. This process includes using the five disciplines that help organizations see the underlying patterns in situations and how to change them. The disciplines are personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking.

When engaging in personal mastery, teachers make choices about what they really want to do and who they want to become. Teacher leaders encourage personal mastery in their colleagues when they act as team leaders, new teacher mentors, and sounding boards for friends.

Mental models are the lenses we use to view the world around us. It is our mental models that drive our actions. Teacher leaders reflect on their own mental models, and teach others in their schools to understand what models guide their own behaviors.

Teacher leaders are also critical to the creation of a shared vision. This occurs when all members of the learning community have the same picture of what they want their school to be and have aligned their values and goals in a genuine commitment to achieving that vision. Shared visions don't just happen; they're created when teacher leaders act as facilitators in staff meetings and faculty gatherings, helping colleagues to create a consensus when opinions differ.

Just as crucial is the promotion of team learning, which begins when teacher leaders create forums for dialogue or conversations that build the capacity of the team to learn from each other. David Bohm says that dialogue is nurtured when:

• All participants "suspend" their assumptions and withhold judgments and impulsive responses,
• Participants view each other as colleagues, and
• A facilitator guides the process.

The final discipline that teacher leaders use as they facilitate change is systems thinking. When a team looks at an organization globally, they can see patterns emerge and help each other find effective ways to change patterns that are barriers to improvement. Teacher leaders help their colleagues to see their school and their school systems in a holistic manner, rather than as the sum of its disjointed parts.Teacher leaders have many tools at their disposal as they facilitate consensus, growth, and change. As teachers grow as facilitators, they first learn to move from a didactic approach to one of shared learning. Practice helps them to see that the true role of a facilitator is to help a group not only to express ideas, but also to channel them. Finally, teacher leaders learn to use the disciplines of Schools that Learn to their advantage, promoting individual insight among colleagues that leads to global change within their schools and school systems.