Leading Change: TRAINING

Facilitating Versus Teaching

Facilitating trainee learning involves more than simply teaching or instructing participants. Facilitation includes creating and managing an environment that makes learning easy. In his book The Skilled Facilitator, Roger Schwarz (1994) suggests that the facilitator’s role is to help groups and individuals improve through “valid information, free and informed choice, and internal commitment to the choices.” Schwarz suggests that a fundamental characteristic of the facilitator is to invite the trainee into a learning opportunity in which the trainee has maximum choice as to whether and how he or she will learn. With these conditions of information and choice, when the trainee decides to learn, it is with an internal ...