Often times we use the terms lecturing, teaching, and facilitating interchangeably, but do they really mean the same thing? In this video, Sam Killermann distinguishes the primary differences between lecturing, teaching, and facilitation and touches on when best to use which method.
Main points:
- think about who can have agency over what material is learned
- who can actively participate in the education
- no engagement method is “the best” they are differently useful
Check out more of Sam’s facilitation and creative work for global justice here.
Transcript
Question: How are facilitation, teaching, and lecturing different?
sK: “There are two major differences that I see between lecturing, teaching, and facilitation. One is the amount of control, or agency that the learner has over what they are learning. And the other one is the amount of active participation required of different people in the room. So with lecturing the person who is educating has complete control over what is being learned and is the only person who is actively participating the whole time.
So with lecturing the person who is educating has complete control over what is being learned and is the only person who is actively participating the whole time. Where as in the other side of what is kind of like a spectrum we have facilitation, where the group learning has almost all the control over what they are learning. And the person who is in the educator role has a shared level of participation with everyone else in the room. Relatively everyone has much lower and equal participation in the learning. And in the m
Where as in the other side of what is kind of like a spectrum we have facilitation, where the group learning has almost all the control over what they are learning. And the person who is in the educator role has a shared level of participation with everyone else in the room. Relatively everyone has much lower and equal participation in the learning.
And in the middle we have teaching where the educator has a lot of control but not exclusive control, because they’ll check in with the group and they’ll make sure that people are learning things. And the learners have some participation but not exclusive participation it is kind of a balance between the two.
The big thing for me is that one is not better than the other, they are different. And when you have to control what’s being learned, there is something very specific thing that people need to walk away from a space knowing, facilitation is not the best thing to choose. But, if you have some general goals and you want things to be learned in a co-creative way and you really want them to stick, facilitation is amazing. Because, people learn from their own learning, they learn from one another, and that kind of learning just hits home.”
