Developing Facilitation Skills for Trainers and Educators

Face to face courses at ITI Istanbul.

The course develops advanced facilitation skills and is aimed at anyone who is involved in training, development and educating others. Facilitation skills are vital in any event that involves creating a safe space for collaboration where people are interacting and discussing ideas to promote change.
The workshops explore the use of participatory approaches to professional development such as team building, gaining participants’ trust, maximizing engagement and fostering collaboration and personal disclosure and simultaneously develops a range of many other performative skills.
The workshops are structured on tried and proven methodology adapted from the participatory arts and used for training in community settings, care homes, hospitals and many institutions focusing on personal and professional development.

Participants will receive a certificate at the end of the course.

Video link: https://youtu.be/H8 ouEilhE

Link to register

These series of workshops explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.

Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. 
This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant (or company) centered (the issues are real concerns and challenges), while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.

Video link: https://youtu.be/CJnw0gR5TTk

Link to register

This paper is based on a series of diagnostic workshops conducted at a teacher training centre in Istanbul focusing on how participatory methodology can inform ELT Teacher Education. The workshops provided participants experience of participatory methodology and techniques to elicit feedback on their pedagogic value and efficacy in Teacher Education. Through dialogue and reflection, participants identify the facilitation skills they value from the workshops. While participatory methodology has a long and proven track record in Applied Theatre, education and development, it is rarely utilized in teacher development programmes. In particular we explored the use of Community Forums (an adaption of Forum Theatre) in which participants re-enact collectively experienced challenges in order to find solutions. Feedback from the workshops reveals that Community Forums provide participant-led, solution-oriented, multiple voiced opportunities for reflection and dialogue on critical incidents teachers’ face. Additionally, the workshops aim to initiate transformational change by developing participants’ facilitation skills. The research provides the initial diagnostic data to create teacher development programmes incorporating Community Forums and participatory methods.

1      Introduction.

Having just attended a series of professional workshops I am struck by a worrying paradox. Most ELT trainers and educators, while advocating lessons that are personalised, learner-centred and focus on communication and language use; in practice deliver training sessions that are tutor-centred, material driven (invariably structured by power point slides) that appear to aim primarily at the transmission of content. If trainers and educators do not set an example of how to encourage participatory learning, it is hardly surprising then that teachers often pay lip service to the concept of ‘facilitating learning’ while in reality they are stuck in the traditional conception of a teacher as a transmitter of information. We sorely need a framework and structured methodology for participant-led, solution-oriented professional development workshops.

One solution may lie in the methodology provided by the participatory arts. Participatory arts provide a form of expression which enables shared ownership of decision-making processes and aims to generate dialogue, reflection, and community cohesion. Adapting the principles and rationale of Forum Theatre I explored the use of participatory methodology (and Commubnity Forums in particular) for teacher professional development in a series of workshops at a teacher training centre in Istanbul. Community Forums are an adaptation of Forum Theatre which was developed by the Brazilian educator, dramatist, director Augusto Boal in 1973. Rooted in the Brazilian social movements of the 1950s and 1960s and based on Paolo Freire’s model of participatory education, it is designed to represent experiences of social and political oppression in order to stimulate community dialogue and problem-solving. Over 50 years later Forum Theatre has been shown to work successfully across a remarkable range of cultural, political, and social differences and demands. It has been used by peasants and workers, students and teachers, artists, social workers, psychotherapists, and NGOs, among others; in schools, streets, churches, hospitals, theatres, and prisons.

2      Methodology

Community Forums can be seen as a methodology for generating both the participants’ understanding of their situation and the actions to improve them so, in other words, it provides both the content (problems) and the methods to interrogate reflection and elicit solutions. The procedure is relatively straight forward and easy for a novice facilitator to follow after basic training. Participants (teachers in our case) are invited to brainstorm and recall crtiical incidents from their experience of challenges / problems they have faced in their work and then share experiences with each other prior to re-enacting the scenarios in groups in order to reflect and diagnose solutions and alternative courses of action. Having investigated and rehearsed a number of scenarios, these then can be scaled up to a wider community by presenting them to an audience and inviting them to discuss and offer alternative solutions. The workshops aim at the education, personal growth and skills development of the participants as well as providing a diagnostic exploration of the efficacy of applying community forums in a professional development setting.

3      Objectives

My specific objectives for the workshops are fourfold.

1.         Diagnostic: To provide an opportunity to experience community forums and to elicit participant-led feedback on their efficacy for teacher education.

2.         Methodologic: Related to the above, to evaluate whether the methodology is appropriate and effective in teacher education settings (does it do what it claims to do).

3.         Pedagogic: To elicit through dialogue and reflection what participants have learned from the workshops.

4.         Transformational: To initiate action or change by providing opportunities to develop facilitation skills for participants to utilize in their own settings.

4      Procedure

The workshops were structured according to two components:

A.) Games and participatory activities and B). Community Forum interrogating the challenges of being an ELT teacher and eliciting creative solutions

A.         Games and participatory activities.

The activities are designed to build and/or develop most, if not all, of the following:

• Trust
• Spontaneity and creativity
• Collaboration
• Listening and awareness
• Communication
• Effective interaction
• Confidence and Capacity
• Information and education
• Problem-solving
• Incitement to change vs catharsis
• Community development

Film footage and demonstrations of the activities can be viewed from this link: https://youtu.be/H8VoyPEilhE

B. Community Forum methodology.

The workshop structure relies on participation. Firstly, the workshops are built on the participants’ personal narratives and experiences. Sharing personal stories can be a powerful way of promoting teacher development through the sharing of experiences (McCabe 2002). Secondly it is inherently educational as the reflective and interactive processes promote self-aware, critically thinking participants. It encourages a ‘bottom up’ approach to change that is advocated in much literature on educational innovation and change (Fullan 2007).

How the Community Forum was set up can be viewed on this link: https://youtu.be/CJnw0gR5TTk)

The three (3 hour) workshops followed this format.

Workshop 1. Tilling the Soil.

Participants warm up to the concept of self-disclosure through activities in pairs and groups. Then we brainstorm the rewards of teaching before relating a story of positive achievement in groups which provides the stimulus for re-enacting the story through image theatre. In the final hour we repeated the cycle but this time brainstorming – challenges, obstacles, difficulties, and concerns of an ELT teacher.

Workshop 2.  ‘Sowing the Seeds’

Participants focus on devising scenes for the community forum scenario. By the end of the workshop we have six scenes and a facilitator/ director allocated to each scene.

Stage 3 ‘Blooming’

Participants focus on developing facilitation skills and rehearsing the forum scenes. The scenarios are pressented to an audience in the Community Forum. The forum aims to stimulate discussion, reflection and debate amongst the audience who are also invited to participate in the search for solutions to the issues raised.

5      Findings and participant feedback

5.1      Real experiences / challenges

The aim of the community forum was to raise awareness and interrogate the challenges that teachers face and to explore solutions. After the first workshop I categorized these challenges into four groups for ease of reference:

1.         Internal challenges (self-doubts, moods, energy levels, lack of confidence / knowledge)

2.         External challenges (from administration, management, learners, parents and colleagues)

3.         Contextual challenges (low pay, large classes, inappropriate methodology and materials)

4.         Cultural challenges (poor communication, long hours, cultural differences)

When planning the workshops, I was concerned that the scenarios presented to the audience would lack authenticity. However, these comments suggest otherwise:

‘It shows the challenges of a teacher. It is nice to know you are not alone experiencing these kind of problems’

‘It mirrors real situations and presents them visually’.

Indeed, one audience member embodied the experience:

‘In the beginning I was so tense and I felt I was exactly the same as Asya (the protagonist), I even felt blank in the first 10 seconds after the show was over. Felt frustrated but then I started thinking how I could help her… things changed. I started to feel more confident. I could think outside the box again. I felt relieved.’

At the end of the second workshop one participant recognized that time and iteration are necessary for depth and wrote: ‘I believe this kind of training will be more ‘fruitful’ if done several times. I mean problems to focus on will get more challenging and therefore the issues raised will be more thought provoking.’

5.2        Metaxis / dramatic distance.

Participants noted that re-enacting the fiction provided space for reflection. Boal (1995, p.43) refers to the term metaxis to describe the idea of living in an imaginary world which creates a dialectic between fiction and reality so knowledge acquired in the fictional world is transferable to the real world through imaginative play.  The benefits of drama to provide ‘distance’ was mentioned by participants as in these examples: ‘I think they open some doors and give perspective about real life problems. Watching other people and seeing the problems acted provides a distance from the problem. So I can think better to find a solution.’

When dramatizing critical incidents participants experience a condition of in-between-ness, a liminal space between reality and fiction. This duality creates both tension and imaginative possibilities that are crucial elements in a training context. Through imagining what it might be like to be another, at the same time as being themselves, participants experience ‘me/not me’ (Schechner, 1985). Transformative theories of learning (Mezirow, 1997) propose that learning occurs when the participant faces a challenge, either an accumulation of experiences over time or a sudden trauma. The state of disequilibrium triggers reflection and critical assessment.

5.3      Reflection and Dialogue.

When prompted to consider the benefits for professional development two comments from the audience included:

‘Confidence, talking about the issues via fictional characters makes people feel better (a bit of therapy) becoming more aware of what happens in their schools’.

‘Imagined situations may be perceived as less confrontational’

Each scenario in our performance highlighted problematic issues involving our teacher protagonist facing challenges. At the end of the event, we had a feedback discussion in which the audience reflected on the experience.

5.4      Participant-led.

By delegating content creation to the workshop participants, the conventional power discrepancy is overturned allowing for participant centred input. This flexibility in facilitation allows for creation of a zone of proximal development for the participants and shifts the responsibility for learning from the facilitator to the participants (Vygotsky, 1986). The zone of proximal development is a concept introduced by Vygotsky to describe the space between ‘not able to do’ and ‘able to do’. In this space participants seek solutions with support from the audience.

One key objective of the workshops is to assess their pedagogic value. One factor that emerged was that as the content was participant led, this allowed space for creativity. One participant commented: ‘It was lovely watching the things that were crafted by people, from nothing‘.

5.5      Change and transformation

A key aspect of the methodology is the degree of change and transformation of the participants. In the final workshop I invited participants to comment on how the workshops assisted in their professional development. Many comments referred to the methodology itself; ‘Creating alternative solutions, scenarios, paths of experience’; ‘Exploring issues that concern teachers can clarify things and help find solutions;’ Many participants commented on the relationship between challenge and enjoyment: ‘It was scary at first, but then, it was fun’. In terms of learning and development there is a need for challenge, as Sawyer (1999) highlights: ‘Change is always connected to the willingness to take risks in going beyond what is known and familiar’.

5.6      Scalability

One key advantage of community forums in terms of teacher development is that the procedure can be scaled up to involve large numbers of participants in a short time period. Simply by training an initial modest cohort of 12 community forum facilitators, if these facilitators subsequently conduct workshops for a further 12 participants and then present their community forums to audiences of 200 teachers, within a limited period more than 2,500 teachers will have been exposed to the issues and had an opportunity to discuss and generate solutions. The forums can be expanded to include other stakeholders such as School Principals, learners, and parents. In addition the impact of the forums in terms of audience responses and committment to finding solutions is visible. The forum can be filmed and/ or audience feedback obtained to provide tangible evidence of impact to sponsors.

5.7      Limitations

One audience member recognised that a representative range of stakeholders are needed to have a genuine interrogation of the issues: ‘Through these workshops we can actually educate heads of department, principals of schools, managers and even teacher trainers in order to create a healthier working environment.’

When asked whether institutions would be interested in professional development using Community Forums there was a mixed response. ‘The institutions are interested in making money. I think they don’t care for using professional development that needs a lot of time and costs a lot maybe’.

‘Here is the point, sometimes people prefer the old-fashioned techniques (books, homework and old rules) so they are not accepting new things.’

6      Conclusion

Community Forums operate at the facilitative, open end of the teaching / training continuum and therefore are liable to elicit more fervent participant responses, interaction and dialogue. Community Forums epitomise an interactionist, participatory approach to learning espousing the philosophy that the process of meaningful dialogue and interaction and the flow of ideas is where learning occurs.

We can conclude by revisiting our initial objectives for the workshops.

1.         Diagnostic.

The workshops generated reflection and discussion that provided valuable information about participants perspectives of Community Forums and its relevance to their development as teachers.

2.         Methodology.

Despite some limitations, such as potential lack of acceptance by institutions and other stakeholders, we can conclude that Community Forums provide participant-led, authentic content to generate solution oriented interventions, reflection, and dialogue of lived experience as well as offering a safe, fictional distance to encourage personal disclosure and multiple perspectives.

3.         Pedagogic

Participants identified numerous facilitation skills that emerged primarily through the games and activities. The methodology provides participants opportunities to develop facilitation skills of raising their awareness of self, others and reflect on their beliefs, behaviour and feelings. These facilitation skills are rarely addressed in teacher education where the focus is primarily on a cognitive, instrumental orientation rather than towards a performative-humanistic understanding of “teaching and learning with head, heart, hands, and feet” (Schewe, 2013, p. 7).

4.         Transformational

My aim in conducting the workshops is to stimulate action and change. The workshops are a pilot project to explore the efficacy of Community Forums and how to develop the skills of facilitators who can  then disseminate the methodology. After my initial diagnostic workshops I have created two short courses: 1) A week intensive training to develop facilitator skills; 2) Three (3 hour) workshops leading to a Community Forum (see Appendix  A). The overall aim is to introduce teachers to a range of techniques to raise awareness of the participatory arts in general and the us of community forums in particular and  reveal a fresh landscape of creative personalised expression, enjoyment and gratification.

Works Cited

Boal, A., 1995. The rainbow of desire: the Boal method of theatre and therapy. Routledge, London; New York.

Freire, P., 1995. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, New York.

Fullan, M., 2007. The new meaning of educational change, 4th ed. ed. Teachers College Press, New York.

Mezirow, J., 1997. Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing , Volume 1997, pp. 5 – 12.

McCabe, A., 2002. A Wellspring for development. IATEFL Publications 82–96.

Sawyer, R.K., 2004. Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation. Educational Researcher 33, 12–20. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X033002012

Schechner, R., 1985. Between theatre and anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schewe, M., 2013. Taking stock and looking ahead: Drama pedagogy as a gateway for performative. Scenario: Journal for Performative Teaching, Learning and Research, Volume 8, pp. 5 – 23.

Vygotsky, L., 1986. Thought and language. Cambridge, Massachucetts: MIT.

7. Appendix

Developing Facilitation Skills for Trainers and Educators

Face to face course at ITI Istanbul.

Video link: https://youtu.be/H8 ouEilhE

These series of workshops explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.

Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. 
This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant (or company) centered (the issues are real concerns and challenges), while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.

Video link: https://youtu.be/CJnw0gR5TTk

Link to register