“Teach students how to facilitate learning in two days?? Impossible!!”, my colleague said. That was 15 years ago. My colleague, who has long since left UTS, was wrong.
Well, she was right as well.
Hi, I’m Georgina. I manage a team of 80 student leaders. Each semester, I train 20-40 new leaders in how to facilitate learning.
U:PASS leaders run study sessions to help students learn the content that they were previously taught by academic staff. The job requires the ability to assess the critical content, design active learning games, discussions and activities, and then facilitate a class of up to 20 students without direct instruction. The PASS/SI approach is a global movement backed up by tonnes of research compiled here.
With recent talk of how to mentor and support new university teachers, I thought I’d share some thoughts on how we train our student leaders to facilitate learning and the principles we work from.
1. Expectations are everything
We make it clear to students that the first semester they are a leader they will develop a lot, and that it takes time to learn how to facilitate. We have a key saying in U:PASS:
Fun Forgiving Flexible
- Fun: Running classes is fun and we hope students, whether they’re learning about the Krebs cycle or the 7 principles of accounting, will have fun.
- Forgiving: Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. Acknowledging it’s ok is really important.
- Flexible: Leaders could have 20 loud students, or 2 quiet ones. They could have too much content, or too little. Flexibility is essential in teaching.
2. Two days is enough
We currently have about 10 hours (plus 3 hours for all the admin and onboarding) of training over 2 days. Day 1 we cover the history of the program, boundaries, referral and duty of care, adult learning principles and designing learning. Two big key elements:
- At the start of the day, we ask the leaders to be meta-aware: watch the way we facilitate, all the tools and techniques we use (e.g. online tools like Google Jamboard (RIP) and Kahoot!, face-to-face tools like butchers’ paper and puzzles on the floor). We make sure we facilitate every activity and tell the leaders they can “steal” anything for their own sessions.
- By the end of Day 1, the leaders have discussed and drafted their own Day 2 sessions. Most of Day 2 is a rotational class practice where each leader runs a 25-minute session, and each participant gives feedback, followed by further feedback from the experienced senior leader. The second day is facilitated by senior leaders – more on them shortly.
By the end of the second day, leaders report feeling ready to step up to run their own classes.
3. Two days is not enough
Teaching is a lifelong developing skill. Let’s not pretend otherwise! But in our program we hope that at the end of a two-year stint as a leader, the leaders will have pretty good basic skills. We have a 3-semester model to achieve that.
First semester: New leaders are allocated a senior leader. The senior leader is given additional training in leadership, mentoring and giving feedback, and has at least one year’s experience as a junior leader. They meet up with the newbie before the classes begin and discuss the leader’s plan, then observe them twice, usually in the second/third and fourth/fifth week of leading. We use an extensive observation form to look at pre-work, during the session behaviour, learning design and implementation, and end of class processes.
Second semester: Myself or my assistant observes using the same form. Our plan here is to help the leader manage a new group (sometimes also a new subject) and look for more minor improvements while also acknowledging all the great things they’re doing.
Third semester: We hope continuing leaders will elect to step up to be a senior leader, and then by watching new leaders’ sessions, continue to develop their own classes as well.
So there you have it – this is how we train facilitators in U:PASS. Reach out if you have questions or want to know more!