Facilitation

Facilitation
All of the teachers in the Bushenyi workshop were selected by their head-teachers (principals) to attend, with the expectation that they would then share with their peers by in their schools.
Tracy, realizing that few (if any) had any training on facilitating professional development sessions included a very solid, practical resource in the teacher binder.

This 1 hour session was a brief overview of the “how to’s” of facilitation. We spent the hour addressing the roles of a facilitator, in context of sharing some of this training with their peer teachers.

While many of the processes are similar to teaching a class, there are some major differences in working with adults, especially your peers. There is a different style in working with adults; while some of the “discipline” issues are the same (and teachers are generally the most misbehaved participants), the strategies to address them are entirely different. Adults learn best by reflecting on the learning activities so (structured) time must provided.

We spent the first ½ of the session exploring the print resource with the Why? Who? What? Where? and How? aspects of hosting a peer training session. As a result, the teachers were introduced to their resource and the basics of how to set up and run a PD session.

Then, the teachers got into small groups to role-play various situations that can arise, and how to deal with them. There was only a short time to plan and only about 2 min of presentation time. Overall, the group did a great job. They also made some reflective comments about themselves, both as participants and as facilitators, when we debriefed the activity.

This reflection came through in one of our “boardroom” debriefing sessions Thursday afternoon. Many of the teachers had already identified the room they would like to use in their own schools. When it came to resources for the session, there was a lot of discussion about wanting and needing more. Tracy shifted the focus to working with what you have, and pointed out that we had made many of our resources for this session; the shift to problem solving this issue showed some brilliant creativity! Everyone addressed the need of the lead teacher (principal) to be “on board” with both the topic and pedagogy as well as supportive of the in-service expectations. Like good teachers everywhere, each of these teachers were concerned about missing time from their own classes in order to deliver these sessions. Some really great discussion ensued about creating resources, sharing resources with schools (e.g. those that did not have chart paper), convincing the lead teacher to be a participant in the first sessions (rather than having JGI run separate sessions for them), partnering up to deliver sessions to other schools…

In terms of resources…

It would be beyond brilliant if each of the teachers could go back to their schools with the PACE and other videos that we had for our session. But, there is not the money at JGI or the Ministry of Education to provide this. Any ideas?