The Facilitator

The facilitator teacher is one that really cares about what I call the “human element”. They are concerned about what the students feel like, their home lives and how they are as a person. They “encourage and natures the growth of the students” as the book states (5 Approaches to Teaching by Gary Fenstermacher and Jonas Soltis). The facilitator’s classroom would focus on how knowledge contributes to the development of the students and freedom of choice. The instruction would be student-centered experimental learning. There would be very few formal tests in this classroom because the students would be evaluating their own learning.

Difficulties? One of the difficulties of the facilitator approach is that there are somethings that must be taught instead of facilitated such as nationalism. The teacher must in some sense, if American, must promote the benefits of America and why it is good.

Another difficulty would be when a student makes a harmful or dangerous choice because the teacher is then forced to determine if the student should then have a choice because if the choice is refused then the facilitator appears to be a false facilitator but the student must also be safe and respectful of others. I feel like sometimes we as teachers cannot be true facilitators because of the restraints that we face.

What appears to be easy about this approach is that the pressure is more on the students than on the teacher. The teacher is only connecting the students to different choices and the students are the ones to make the choice.