From Teaching to Facilitating Learning
When the same students sitting in a business school classroom participate in a training session at their corporation nowadays, there is evidence that they may be engaged in a very different way.
They may, for instance, be invited to identify their personal learning goals, and even in more traditional training settings they are invited to periodically assess how well the training is working for them, providing feedback, and in some cases voting with their feet by not showing up. The best development programs are tailored to the realities and defined needs of the individual, rather than being based on a generic list of desirable skills and behaviors. Needs assessments and surveys or organizational diagnostics may be conducted for trainers to understand the organization and the challenges the participants are facing. Trainers and coaches may study the corporate business strategy and how the individuals’ performance could support it better; they may connect the contents of the training sessions with scorecards, performance reviews, 360° instruments, and developmental goals of the individuals involved. The best coaches and trainers design their sessions bearing in mind the different learning styles of the participants, and they pay constant attention to the levels of energy in the room. In good corporate development programs, the teaching and learning are mutually reinforcing; they are not decoupled as in our educational institutions, and they are both considered the responsibility of both the instructor and the participants.
While this may seem to place the burden of responsibility exclusively on the trainer and relieve the student of any accountability for growth, in actuality the opposite occurs. When the student is relieved of the obligation to comply with the expectations of the instructor, ownership of the process ceases to be that of the teacher. Who owns the process then? As if a ball were tossed in the air that the instructor does not catch, then students automatically might tend to catch it. When students realize that they are not studying and performing “for the instructor,” they begin to realize that they are the central beneficiaries of their learning. As a result, the learner’s accountability increases significantly. Or the participant lets the ball drop and doesn’t show up.
A Story
Some years ago I was teaching a Change Management course at the MBA in the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires. At the first session I asked students what they would need from me, how they would like this course to be run. After some minutes of puzzlement, they began to state expectations like “don’t lecture,” “make it interactive,” “have dialogues,” “make it real.” I accepted the request, and proposed that they would read certain materials, and we would use the sessions to explore reactions, questions, their perspectives on what they read, and how it related to an ongoing change project they would manage in their organization. Everyone liked the idea.
All went well—for a few weeks. Then one class as I entered the room there was an unusual silence. As I asked the question: What did you think about the reading this week? I couldn’t catch the eyes of anyone. They were looking at their papers, out the window, at their fingers. I asked them what was happening, and after exchanging some looks among them, one student spoke up. “What happened is that this week we had a lot of work for mid-term from the other courses. And the other professors are not like you … .” Without inquiring what that meant, I reflected for a moment and made another offer. Look, we agreed on doing it this way because it was what you asked for. But it may not be realistic, and it may not fit your needs, so moving forward I am willing to come with prepared lectures.
There was a silence in the room. After a few moments, another student spoke up.
I don’t know if others agree with me, Professor, but I think we are just not used to this. We have all had 16 years of educational experience where the teachers told us what to do, and how, and when. This is different. You are asking us to decide, to take responsibility for what we want to learn, and we can influence the how. I think we’re just not used to it. Would you give us another chance, to try it out for a few more weeks?
He looked around the room and others were nodding in agreement.
That is what we did. I explained again that I was there to serve their needs, to help them learn, and that how we did it was something that we could periodically revisit and change. Needless to say, they all read and participated from there on until the end of the semester.
Professional instructors design their sessions with the learning outcomes in mind, and apply principles of adult learning to make the experience more powerful and effective. That means that the participants are invited to influence the design and contents to best suit their context and learning needs. This is the cornerstone of ownership of the learning process. The role of the instructor changes, and he or she becomes more focused on facilitating learning.
Learning facilitation is an approach to development that is particularly suited for responsible management education. Responsible management education1 is defined as the preparation and development of individuals to address the complex planetary challenges. Different authors include in this the ability to shape a better world, to restore the earth’s resources, to address the developmental goals for a sustainable world as defined by the United Nations Global Compact.2 Given the size of our challenge, all the different professional disciplines will be called to address the problems from their particular technical perspective (engineering, technology, strategy, finance, accounting, marketing, law, social sciences, health sciences, urban planning, agricultural sciences, etc.). Yet, there is more than technical knowledge involved in developing responsible management.
Scholarly research about the knowledge, skills, and competencies that responsible management calls for has identified aspects related to a host of different content areas: ecoliteracy,3 systems thinking,4 scenario planning, complexity theory,5 change management, ethics,6 emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence,7 leadership,8 stakeholder theory,9 collaborative practices,10 contemplative practices,11 creativity and innovation,12 social entrepreneurship. These content areas shape and inform a particular way of thinking, being, and acting in the world, and are core to the responsible management we need for our world—independent of the manager’s professional orientation.
Responsible management education therefore is not limited to an intellectual understanding of the contents, the challenges, and opportunities, but instead demands a holistic engagement of the individual: it touches the values, the identity, the purpose, the assumptions and beliefs, the habits, the sense of self, and even the soul.13
This kind of development requires the full presence of the participants, meaning not just their physical presence in the room, but also a presence with all their senses and all their being. More than a cognitive exercise of the mind, educators are tasked with fostering an integral development of the individuals. This is when it becomes clear that the traditional approach to teaching, so common in our business schools, has become inadequate. We cannot teach values, there are no formulas to calculate a person’s purpose; we cannot test the student’s understanding of what will make them responsible change agents. Independently of the context and contents we are teaching, there is a component that relates not to facts and data, but to making meaning out of the whole learning experience. And this is when we need to bring back the passion, to foster accountability for the results. We need the full person in the room.14
In this section, we have seen that our audience in the classroom has dramatically changed. The purpose of education also changed, if we think that our most important priority is bringing this planet back into sustainability—or even shaping a world that for once is flourishing for all. We need to develop empowered individuals who can drive creative change. As the Principle #3 wisely anticipated it, for responsible management education, we need new learning methods and tools.15 Given the urgency to act, we need to stop teaching lessons, and to start facilitating learning for students.
In the next section, we will introduce ten learning principles for facilitating learning, and where they originated.