050519-2 mentor handbookf - The INCLEN Trust

Facilitation skills
Where are you?
Instructor
Facilitator
In the past few decades there has been a move away from traditional ‘teacher led’
(didactic) ways of imparting knowledge towards methods where the educator
becomes a ‘facilitator’ of learning (Loftus-Hills & Harvey 2000).
The term facilitator comes from the Latin ‘facilitas’ meaning ‘easiness’, and the verb
‘to facilitate’ means ‘to make easy, promote or help forward’.
From this it can be suggested ‘facilitation’ describes the process of enabling students
to learn and to adapt or change their behaviour by:
• providing a helping hand
• removing obstacles
• creating a smooth pathway for the students to
pursue their learning journey.
Facilitation is a style of teaching which stems from the work of the psychologist Carl
Rogers. He developed ideas in understanding how students learn most effectively,
including student-centred learning which is non-critical, non-directive, self-directed,
reflective and where students are involved in the learning process (Rogers 1969,
Brookfield 1986).
Bently (1994) highlighted the difference between teaching and facilitating learning
when he noted that:
facilitators concentrate on providing the resources and opportunities for learning to
take place, rather than manage and control learning.
A facilitator is neither a ‘content expert’ nor a lecturer.
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Version 2 23 January 2006
© School of Health and Social Care, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford