Sarah Jones' Diary

Week 5
After last week was almost looking forward to tonight but it turned out to be all a bit theoretical and no fun and games.

J said from now on we were going to be refocussing course from learning and evaluation issues to practical evaluation skills for facilitators.

[ Bizarre – we have done nothing but practical exercises so far on this course in order to learn theory. Now, having just talked about learning practical skills, we had our first real theory lecture. Doh!]

Basically it was an evening on looking at the role of the teacher and the nature of the teacher – student relationship.
I think

We’ve been told long enough that we are now supposed to be ‘managers of the learning environment’, ‘facilitators of learning’, ‘learning support professionals’, ‘personal learning coaches’ or whatever else some half baked pose-y writer in the TES comes up with but none of them actually spell out what this means or what you are supposed to do differently.

Her-with-the-roots (definitely gray) reckoned that although there is probably a case for saying the 21st Century, Decaffeinated, High Octane Super Teacher actually does some different things from the old style, polyunsaturated full-fat and high-tar variety, mostly it’s a case of them doing the same things differently. Her point was that the biggest change was in the nature of the relationship between learner and teacher – hence we could do with looking at that in a bit more detail.

We were asked to describe or label any differences in teaching styles we can identify. Most people could remember directive, non-directive and laissez-faire from training college days. (Wonder if they are still churning the same old stuff out?).

This, apparently, was not good enough.

Seems like back in the early 70’s (like before I’m born, man!) these two guys invented something called Dimensions of Facilitator Style. I wrote loadsa notes about other stuff they wrote as well (Paradigm Papers, Six Category Intervention Analysis, Behavioural Analysis in Education and Training….how’s that for showing off????)

[Mind you, the most interesting thing was they worked at an uber-weird place called the Institue for the Development of Human Potential in University of Guildford which ran courses for people who wanted to be born again – not as in Cliff Richard or in Billy Graham but as in fully grown adults (mostly super annuated hippies) crawling through giant size birth canals. Wahay! Love it]

So, back to the point, they figured that the directive / non-directive divide was OK as a starter but a bit simplistic on its own (that’s why they teach it in training college) and we really need something a bit more sophisticated.

They came up with 6 elements of facilitator style - except they called them dimensions – across which people could differ. J has twiddled and fiddled and reinterpreted them a bit and now has 7 or 8.

• Structured vs unstructured

• Directive vs non-directive

• Cathartic vs non-cathartic

• Disclosing vs non-disclosing

• Catalytic vs non-catalytic

• Confronting vs non-confronting

• Interpretive vs non-interpretive

She talked us through them all then gave us a handout so no point in going into it in depth. And there is a video called the 'Dimensions of Facilitator Styles'.

Then we got into groups (more on that later) and as a group we had to plot along all the dimensions where we thought she (J) was coming from on this course.

Couldn’t believe the differences in our opinions – we argued for ages. I thought she was completely undirective – like she asks us a lot what we want to go do and the course has been unstructured to the point of chaotic sometimes (I remember all those tables and chairs stacked up the first night). She usually asks when we want to go for coffee and for how long and doesn’t usually care if people work in groups or how big the groups are – in fact, lots of it seems a bit random to me. She also has this big deal going on about not being prescriptive about teaching.

Saw Graham starting to snigger in the background, which is always a bit of a clue so figured he knew something I didn’t and shut up.

Magda disagreed – she reckoned the whole course was quite directive (like we have some choices occasionally but from a range of options) and really tightly structured.

The only thing we really agreed on was that she was fairly ‘disclosing’ as there were lots of anecdotes about her experiences and she definitely is not slow on expressing her personal opinions.

Everything else we disagreed on so it was quite hard reaching a consensus.

After we had done that, J showed us the one she had compiled for herself before the course.

Dunno how to draw diagrams on blog so will just say her self constructed profile was ‘very structured, medium directive, not very cathartic, VERY prescriptive, quite catalytic, very disclosing, very confronting (stroppy cow)’

But then she drew another profile line in which was a bit different and said that after a bit of self-reflection she thought that this new profile was what had ACTUALLY happened rather than what she had planned. The biggest difference was tat she reckoned she had been a lot more directive than she had hoped because she felt that she was in danger of running out of time on a lot of stuff and had started to panic a bit and tighten the reins.

In fact, she is a control freak. Graham agreed.

Was not altogether clear how this feeds into the evaluation process and how can it be used as an evaluation tool.

Turned out that the point of it all was J said that evaluating the relationship between learner and teacher was important and it’s useful to have a baseline against which to judge. So she said that for each course she runs and for each group she usually works out in advance what style-profile is appropriate then uses it to check back each day against what really happened. If there is a perfect match, then happy days. If one of the points is way out then you have to ask, was that accidental (bad) or was it a positive response and repositioning because of new circumstances.

Sounds positively anal to me.

Doing a lesson plan is about as much as I can find time for, now she is suggesting we plan the teacher student relationship so we have something to evaluate it against.

Anyway, we then had a go at doing a profile for ourselves – as we thought we normally operated with our students in class. That was a bit of fun.

Then J said that although most people had a ‘natural’ or preferred style it was important to realize the degree of control can be varied with a bit of practice.

How do you make decisions about what style is appropriate?
Well, this is the easy bit cos it’s all S’s.

Students (new adult returners to learning prob. need you to be a bit more cathartic and run around like Butlin’s Red Coat making sure they are having a nice time than say post-grad counseling students)
Subject (a non-prescriptive brain surgery course is well dodgy)
Space (kids running non-dirctively round a lab is not so good either)
Stage of development (like as students get more experienced you can loosen up a lot)
Slot (like how bad is it having some drippy touchy-gropey-feely trainer being non-directive in the last-thing-in-the-afternoon graveyard slot on a training day?)

Last going off we did a practical evaluation of the evening and used something called Hamlin’s model for doing it. It was really quick and we only did the first three levels – that’s REACTION (knee jerk response), LEARNING (one thing I learned to do or found out), BEHAVIOUR CHANGE (one thing I’d do differently as a result. Left the last two – that was GROUP or INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE and a pretty wooly one at the end called ideological change.

This sounded a bit familiar – remember doing something similar on another course but it was a model by a guy called Kirkpatrick. J said Hamlin prob more appropriate to learner centred, adult ed stuff because Kirkpatrick was dealing mainly with commercial training environment and was therefore having to take account of stuff like work Return on Investment etc