The Professor's Apprentice, On Group Learning and Facilitating

On Group Learning and Facilitating

 Recently I've been interested in how to be a better facilitator in my classroom. I spent the year working with a number of expert Outward Bound Instructors. Just watching them lead a discussion and debrief an experience taught me a great deal about facilitation and forced me to think about what's really going on when we make the assumption that learning is happening in groups. I asked Arianna, one of the North Carolina Outward Bound instructors for some advice. She inspired me to begin a journey of conversations with people whose facilitation styles I admire. Be on the lookout for great bits of wisdom in these chats. I've already learned so much; I'm excited to share with you and work on practicing what they've taught me.
Me: Ari, What makes a facilitator effective?
Arianna: when facilitators guide their work based on the tone of the conversation--what is being said, how it is being said, how it is being heard; when they are able to attend to the mood of the conversation and gracefully make the implicit, non-verbal conversation in the room part of the explicit spoken conversation. Authentically showing up, being fully present and listening deeply with all our senses (including the subtler senses like intuition and the heart) have been key ways for me to do this. Facilitators are also effective when the people involved in the conversation feel like 90% of the process was based on self-discovery and their own decision-making. (In line with Lao Tzu's wisdom "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.")
As originally posted by: The Learning Brain, http://thelearningbrain.tumblr.com/post/23703756982/on-group-learning-and-facilitating