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One of the things that excites me most about being human is that we are capable of learning, growing, and changing. I enjoy facilitating many different kinds of learning with both children and adults, individuals and communities, as well as my own learning. I am curious about learning: How does it happen? What supports learning? Where do learning and knowledge reside? My curiosity has compelled me to teach in many different settings, to reflect on my teaching, to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and to do educational research at Project Zero.
As a facilitator, perhaps my prime task is to support the development of authentic understandings. By authentic, I mean solid and strong, but also flexible, "unfinished" and evolving. I also mean tangible, or rooted in experience, and sustainable, or real and complex enough to continue to engage learners over time. Authentic understanding is also self-appropriated — it holds personal meaning in one's own contexts.
Some of the factors that can help develop these kinds of understandings include:
As early as first grade, kids begin looking for "the right answers," for the answers that they believe the teacher is looking for. In a sense, they are using scripts. They sense, perhaps subconsciously, that they must play their part in order to keep the class moving forward. I believe this is detrimental for learning and the development of authentic understanding. Learners need time to play with concepts, ideas, and constructs. They need time and space for messing about. They need an environment that allows for serendipity—one that does not adhere to scripts.
Related to the role of improvisation, I believe that embracing and learning from mistakes is elemental in the process of learning. Often, teaching focuses on efficiency, "getting it right" as soon as possible, and end-states (a focus on what one "now knows"). This can lead to overlooking or dismissing the value of mistakes, of exploration, and of the processes involved in building an understanding of something.
Inefficiency can be a lot of fun too. It can be joyful to simply savor the physical experience of a moment, to mess around with some new thing or ideas without a specific goal in mind, or to actively seek "mistakes" or wrong answers just to see what can be learned from them. As in improvising, allowing or inviting mistakes can open doors for serendipitous learning and unforeseen discoveries. As David Hawkins posits, inefficiency, both rich and redundant, tends to engender more efficient and solid learning over time.
Perhaps the single most important thing a facilitator can do to promote a sense of trust and comfort in sharing one's ideas is to listen to learners. When students' ideas are truly heard, when a facilitator takes that idea and runs with it and explores it with the student(s), the student feels that they are a part of the learning experience. They recognize that they are co-creators, not passive recipients.