Learning with the Children

At Kaleide, the role of a facilitator is first and foremost to be that of a learner alongside the children. This powerful idea has been supported by educational research showing that when teachers facilitate reciprocal teaching and learning roles in their classrooms, students' learning improves. In a reciprocal learning relationship, teachers are not expected to know everything. In particular, it is important to acknowledge that each member of the school, regardless of his or her age, brings knowledge from which we are all able to learn. In this way, we aspire to build a caring and inclusive learning community where each person feels that his or her contribution is valued, and that they can participate to their full potential.

The root of the word facilitator is “facilis,” the Latin word for “easy”.

The choice to call our teachers “facilitators” is a deliberate one; while facilitators may sometimes provide direct instruction, facilitation is something you do with a group, not to it; a facilitator is a person who provides unobtrusive assistance, guidance, or supervision that makes it easier for students to self-direct their learning. Facilitators talk with the children, listen to them, and observe. They are partners, nurturers and guides. Assessing what they see, they can plan how to respond and teach next steps immediately in a way that is uniquely suited to a particular child in that particular moment. The facilitator is a researcher, a resource and guide who lends her expertise to children, providing a differentiated learning pathway that allows for a broad balance of opportunity, challenge and content.

In our approach, much attention is paid to the interactions between facilitators and children. The adult not only explores the relations between herself and the children, and between the children, but she also takes initiatives to create a positive group climate, by suggesting activities to children that wander around, offering materials that fit in an ongoing activity, inviting children to communicate, confronting them with thought-provoking questions and giving them information that can capture their mind. It is the child's expression, and through it her personality and her experience, that become the focus of our interest. For this reason, facilitators will first listen rather than talk.

Dialogue

Dialogue is an essential component of the relationship between facilitators and children. By dialogue we do not mean just talking, but a genuine dialogue which is open-ended and which becomes “a common search for understanding, empathy or appreciation”, in the words of Nel Noddings.

Facilitators need to bring themselves to school, to use their own lives, their passions and interests, their knowledge and explorations as elements within the curriculum. This dialogue creates a space for connection and closeness, which are essential to caring relationships. The facilitator's dialogue with the child avoids questions that the facilitator knows the answer to. It is authentic dialogue, aimed to support the child in her learning and development as a person.

Modelling

Children learn from observing adults and older children, and imitating what they see. In this sense, facilitators act as important role models for the children, at least in four areas:

• caring (for oneself, for others, for ideas, for the human-made world, and for the natural world);

• attitudes to learning (a positive disposition to take on challenges, learning from mistakes, and sharing what we know);

• communication and conflict resolution (empathy, listening skills, dialogue and finding common ground);

• values (cooperation; treating everybody with respect, equality, and fairness).

This modelling is an important element of any moral education, but from the perspective of an ethic of caring, it is vital: we do not tell children to care; we show them how to care by creating caring relations with them. Facilitators accept disagreement, and foster discussions and criticism as a way to advance social and emotional learning. This pleasure in teamwork provides a valuable model of cooperation for the children.

Interventions and Provocations

The role of facilitators at Kaleide International School covers a wide range of interventions aiming to favour well-being and involvement from an experiential learning perspective, such as rearranging the classroom in appealing “learning landscapes”, observing how the children use resources and replacing unattractive materials by more appealing ones, supplying and displaying a wealth of "loose parts" to boost creativity, and decontextualizing objects (placing an old typewriter out in the garden, for example) to trigger the children's surprise and exploration.

We encourage children's lateral thinking and value their ideas. There is no "right" or "wrong" way of using materials at Kaleide, as long as they are treated with care.

If at any moment you are feeling anxious about the kinds of choices your students are making in terms of activities, ask yourself:

• What skills are being practiced in this activity?

• Which modes of intelligence are being engaged?

• What is this child doing now that they weren’t doing last week/last month/at the beginning of the school year?

Our routines have a high degree of flexibility, and we strive to make every day different, which helps children develop a positive attitude towards change.

Developing a Growth Mindset

Facilitators do not praise individual children's intelligence or ability –only their progress and effort. In line with Carol Dweck's research on how a “growth mindset” can impact student's self-concepts and learning, we think that children are more motivated if they believe that intelligence and ability can be improved through hard work. Facilitators contribute to children's beliefs about their ability to improve their intelligence by praising their productive effort and strategies (and other processes under a child's control) in relation to the goals they have set for themselves, rather than their innate ability. They prompt students to feel more in control of their learning by encouraging them to set learning goals (i.e., goals for improvement) rather than performance goals (i.e., goals for competence or approval).

Your highest value has less to do with content dissemination and more to do with creating a positive learning community with an emotional environment that supports learning.