Facilitated vs Directed Learning

Jun 25

High schools students discuss their work in a group.

The definition of facilitate is to make an action easy or easier. Facilitated learning is student-centered with emphasis on student engagement, self-assessment, and peer review. In mastery-based learning, having the students direct the learning in the classroom is critical to achievement. The teacher should act as a facilitator of learning instead of the director.

What is the Problem with Directed Learning?

A director of learning acts as the source of knowledge. These classrooms usually revolve around lecture and independent practice. Most assignments are collected and graded for accuracy, which eliminates the question-and-answer feedback period for students.

The problem with only using directed learning in a classroom is the lack of engagement and feedback between teacher and students. Students are pressured to produce quality work on practice assignments without the benefit of peer review or collaborative feedback.

This sets students up for failure by promoting a classroom atmosphere of fear and prevents the student risk-taking needed to develop new skills. Students avoid failure by not completing practice work, which in turn leads them to not master the skills and objectives being taught,

What is Facilitated Instruction?

Facilitated instruction includes direct teaching, independent practice, and collaborative learning. The classroom atmosphere should encourage collaboration for mastery instead of competitive learning. Students should compete against themselves – with each student assessing and reassessing his or her own level of mastery and setting goals of achievement accordingly.

The goal of facilitated learning is to increase student engagement and metacognitive skills. These strengthen the learning process, which in turn increases the amount of completed assignments.

How can teachers facilitate instruction?

As a facilitator, the teacher’s primary task is encouraging student engagement with the curriculum. Lessons and units that promote collaborative learning, peer review of work, and self-assessment of independent practice will help students develop the metacognitive skills necessary for growth.

Metacognition means knowing what you know – and knowing what you don’t know. This skill promotes the critical question-and-answer feedback between students and teacher.

A facilitator does not promote a practice of punishment for error or failure within formative activities and assessments by grading them. Instead, the risk-taking that produces failure is utilized as a learning tool. This is why it is important to score practice work for completion instead of grading it.

Lessons and units should be planned with clear standards, goals, or objectives. These standards should be presented to students at the beginning of the unit and referred to throughout instruction. The emphasis during instruction should always be on the development of students’ mastery of those skills.

Why should students develop metacognitive skills?

In Mastery-Based Grading, student development of metacognition is critical to the learning process. Students must be able to self-evaluate, reflect, inquire, and accept criticism to master new skills. As students improve their metacognition, it becomes easier for the teacher to identify problem areas and differentiation needs.

Metacognition can be achieved through a variety of strategies, discussed below.

Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning is the foundation of mastery-based learning. Students should be arranged in collaborative groups, either self-determined or created through the evaluation of performance assessments. (Collaborative groups work best if they are formed using measurable data.)

Students in these collaborative groups should be responsible for sharing formative information: notes and materials provided by the teacher, discussion of tasks and assignments within the lesson or unit of study, and review of peer work on formative and summative (when appropriate) assessments before submission for grading.

Clear Learning Objectives

Students should be taught how to locate, identify, and understand the goals and objectives they are to master. These goals should be posted by the teacher for the duration of the objective’s study. In addition, students should thoroughly understand the criteria being used to evaluate their level of mastery achievement and the scales or rubrics that determine them.

Critical Feedback

Formative lessons should include 5-10 minutes where students may provide peer review on the task at hand before returning to whole class instruction or review. Most importantly, the teacher needs to model how to give, receive, and learn from critical feedback. Until students master giving and receiving this critical feedback, teachers need to model it every day.

In addition, students need to feel safe asking questions about their learning, as well as providing feedback to classmates in a respectful manner. Students should understand that “being nice” to their friends instead of providing an honest critique when they evaluate work actually harms other students’ ability to learn. These abilities are essential to collaborative learning in a classroom.

Student Self-Assessment

How can teachers can rely on students to grade their own quizzes without lying about the results? To prevent this, teachers should demonstrate the negative consequences of “cheating” before it occurs.

For example, teachers should explain and demonstrate how weighted grading works. In a mastery-based classroom, quizzes are a smaller percentage of the overall grade, but there are many more of them than summative assessments (which make up a larger percentage of the overall grade). Having a few low quiz scores will not have as great an impact on students’ overall grade, especially if the students benefit from the self-assessment during the review.

If a student frequently lies about the results of his or her quizzes, it will show when they complete the more valuable summative assessments. A low grade on a test or essay will lower a student’s grade significantly.

Teachers should emphasize this and review it frequently in the first grading period of the school year in order to make the metacognitive expectation clear. When the students who complete and correct formative assessments also earn better grades on summative activities, it will encourage more engagement in other students.

Student Control

Student control of the learning is often the most difficult part for most teachers. Teachers must allow some student control of the curriculum requirements.

Students must be able to propose solutions without immediately being corrected. Teachers must foster the students’ ability to collaborate and benefit from the class’s knowledge, experiences, and points of view. This is the key to being a facilitator of learning.

It is the key to fostering life-long learning in our students.

Review

Teachers should model a variety of ways that students can determine solutions rather than acting as the only source of a solution in learning. By using facilitated learning, teachers will help their students develop metacognition.

Classrooms utilizing teachers as facilitators use strategies such as direct instruction, independent and collaborative group practice and review, as well as teacher feedback. Formative activities and assignments are scored for their level of completeness instead of being graded on accuracy. This leads to increased student engagement in the practice of the mastery objective.

Student-driven curriculum topics also enhance student engagement, inquiry, and feedback. The end goal of this educational process is mastery of skill, standards, and objectives. Therefore, formative activities and assignments should be a much smaller percentage of the overall student grade than the summative assessments in which students demonstrated the level of mastery they achieved.