Becoming a great facilitator

Remember Robin Williams, the teacher in the movie Dead Poets' Society. How he inspired, entertained, provoked, challenged and won the respect of his students? Was it simply what he had to say, or was there something about the way he moved about, the gestures he used to illustrate ideas or make a point, the facial expressions or the tone of his voice?

If your response is yes, then you will probably have noticed that being a great facilitator of learning is no different to being a Kung Fu master, a jumbo jet pilot or a brilliant opera singer. You practice ‘the moves” so what you say AND do becomes an automatic, fluent and brilliant performance .

As part of my work, I help teachers learn how to use collaborative technologies in their classrooms. They learn how to make the shift from their role as lecturers or instructors to facilitators, a shift from telling to asking, from listening to conversing. We practice "the moves", not only what to say, but what gestures to use with each verbal instruction to quickly help the group work together like a "thinking orchestra". We learn to become facilitators by working with a group of fellow learners, helping each other to improve our performances. Each of us offers subtle reminders of what to say, what buttons to press and mouse clicks to use, and helpful insights into the best sequence for the activity. Each successive performance becomes more brilliant than the one before.

It works this way. Each of us has set of the frontal lobes, which are much larger in humans than in other animals. On the left hand side, just above the left ear, is Broca's area where we orchestrate motor and speech activity. We sequence what we do and say, so we don't stutter, trip, stumble, stall the car, crash the plane nor play shambolic violin concertos. It is here we have "mirror neurons", the empathy center of the brain. These clever neurons fire off when we watch someone do something AND when we perform the action ourselves. They are the same neurons that are activated when children engage in collective play, where they imitate or play at being mothers and fathers, cops and robbers or doctors and nurses and as Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed, perform as if they were “a head taller”.

It's almost as good as performing the actions ourselves. Great athletes practice in a similar way. They imagine winning the marathon, skiing faster than ever before, jumping higher than anyone thought possible. By the time we complete 6-7 individual dress rehearsals of the same performance, we can generally rely on Broca's area to automatically orchestrate/sequence an extraordinarily complex array of activities, below conscious awareness. It's' our personal automatic pilot.

So here's a way of practicing a new role:

1. Watch/imagine a person performing in your desired role (or remember their performance)? What did they do or say?
2. Thinking about a new role that you wish to perform, describe in detail the “language game” for that role (words, phrases, concepts, theoretical relationships/connections between concepts)?
3. Thinking about a new role that you wish to perform, describe in detail the “gestural language game” for that role (movement, gestures, demeanor, stance, actions)?
4. Describe a situation in which you will perform your new role. What will you say and do?
5. Working in pairs, perform your new role for a buddy. The other person makes notes about the performance and identifies the types of errors that the person makes (Think about previously learned speech/gestural routines, inner speech to guide your activity, the ideal speech/gesture).
6. What did we learn from this activity?