Make it possible.......

"We can not teach another person directly: we can only facilitate his learning"

(Carl Rodgers 1961)

I have noticed so far that in each Pedagogy session the skill or the concept being explored is something that I have already used subconsciously or just from intuition in the laboratories that I demonstrate. However as a result of the sessions I am beginning to hone the skills that are required and develop my pedagogical approach in a very conscious structred manner.

This week in the pedagogy session the topic we covered was the concept of facilitation. The role of facilitation is to assist and to ease the student while they learn, and to provide them with the raw materials to learn. This is very relevant to the laboratory demonstration that I am involved in. In the lab I try to create an environment that makes it as easy as possible for the students to apply the theories from their lectures into practical skills in the lab. The raw material, in this case is the lab equipment and this is laid out in the lab. The students have the laboratory manual that outlines how to perform the experiment, what information they are required to gather and what they need to do to analyse this information for the purpose of the given lab. My role here is to guide the lab, to explain the procedure and to respond and give feedback. These are some of the key skills in facilitation, but the biggest skill in effective facilitation is questioning. Questions in the lab setting really provide a connection between, what the student is doing and why they are doing it. It helps to relate the activities back to the theory and helps to focus the students when they reflect on the lab in their discussion and conclusion for their report. The type of questions that you ask also has an effect on the students learning. Internally we can judge an “easy” question and a “hard” question, but there is a model that classifies questions based on learning objectives; Bloom’s taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom was an American psychologist who worked in education in the middle of the last centuary, and focused his research around classifying educational objectives. Bloom’s taxonomy is still used in the design of curricula and assessments today.

Each level in the triangle lends itself to the next; if you don’t remember the facts, how can you evaluate a problem that they are based on? I have used all of these types of questions in my lab sessions without the structure until now. The “easy” and “hard” types of questions have been presented to us throughout our academic lives and the strongest link I can make in my experience of learning and Bloom’s taxonomy is leaving certificate maths; the questions are broken down into a, b, and c parts and progressively require more work and effort. I don’t think it is the effort alone that will determine progression to the top level of Bloom’s taxonomy I do believe the learner’s intellect, interest and ability are also limiting factors, however I think facilitation is paramount. With this in mind I can see what it is so important to ask questions that challenge all levels of the pyramid, to facilitate the students that are beginning to understand as well as providing the opportunity for the creators to excel. I also think it is a tool that I could use to assess the individual students abilities. Often when I ask students do they understand what they are doing they will respond with a resounding “Yes”. Asking questions in a more structured way like Bloom’s model would really help me to identify what level students were at. This would guide the lab session to potentially help students achieve a higher level of learning and also provide a space to evaluate and create.

“What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning" (Dr. Benjamin Bloom,Developing Talent in Young People, 1985)

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