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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Praise for Facilitating Group Learning "In this engaging and accessible book, George Lakey draws on alifetime's experience to provide a highly practical resource toanyone seeking to understand and respond to the complexities ofgroup work. The book will be invaluable to anyone trying to effectsocial change through groups while striving to stay simultaneouslysane and employed."--Stephen D. Brookfield, DistinguishedUniversity Professor, University of St. Thomas "I've been working with forms of direct education for manydecades, and I found new ideas and inspirations in every chapter.For anyone involved in teaching, training, sharing skills, orleading groups, this book is an invaluableresource!"--Starhawk, author, The Earth Path, Dreaming theDark, and Webs of Power "George Lakey has inspired our union to engage in education in away that challenges us to redefine social justice and equality innew and exciting ways. This book helps us to continue our journeyto touch the souls of union members."--Denis Lemelin, nationalpresident, Canadian Union of Postal Workers "Facilitating Group Learning will ease the way of all whoventure into the white waters of facilitation. George clarifies themost basic, complex, and nagging challenges of facilitation, whilehonoring the realities of individual and social power dynamics andproviding real-life examples from the path of continued growth andmastery. A rare gift!"--Niyonu D. Spann, founding president,TRV Consulting and Beyond Diversity 101 "This book is a must-read for people who teach adults of anyage, no matter what the subject, and care about doing it in waysthat yield deep and abiding learning. Wonderfully well-written andrich with psychological and spiritual insights as well as practicalstrategies, it represents the fruits of a lifetime oftransformational teaching and learning by one of the foremost adulteducators of our time."--Parker J. Palmer, author, The Courageto Teach, Let Your Life Speak, and The Heart of HigherEducation
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1 Introduction:
Direct Education for Adult Learning Groups
Making Our Peace with the Complexity of It All
Letting Go of the Old Paradigm of Education
What Is Direct About Direct Education?
The Method of This Book
Part I: The Learning Group and the Individual
2 The Role of the Individual and the Group in Direct Education
What Makes a Pro-learning Social Order?
Whose Responsibility Is the Container?
“There’s No
Time
for Container Building!”
Let Them Know About the “Comfort Zone”
Container Building Is Acknowledging Reality
3 Harnessing the Power of Intention
Teachers’ Expectations When Working with Disadvantaged Groups
Framing the Experience as an Act of Self-Responsibility
Push Them to Deal with Their Ambivalence
The Individual Versus the Group
Workshops and Courses Are Social Constructions
4 Strengthening the Container:
Subgroups Join the Mix
How Can We Acknowledge Margins?
Margins Emerge in the Course
How Ground Rules and Group Agreements Can Build the Container
Beyond Ground Rules and Group Agreements
Who’s the Enforcer of Group Norms?
Functions of the Container
How People Teach Themselves When the Container Is Strong
5 The Secret Life of Groups
How Can the Secret Life of Groups Accelerate Learning?
Good News for the Facilitator
Creating Bridges to the Secret Life of the Group
When the Group Wants to Become a High-Performance Team
Part II: Diversity, Difference, and Emotions in Group Learning
6 Acknowledging Difference to Accelerate Learning
What’s at Stake for a Society Troubled by Difference?
Differences Within the Margin
What’s a Mainstream to Do?
But What About Oppression?
7 Diversity and Conflict Styles
What
Are
Our Cultural Assumptions About Communication and Conflict?
Accusations of Racism in a Learning Group
8 Social Class and Diversity
“Calling Out”: A Classist Intervention?
Making Learning the Priority
9 Authenticity, Emotion, and Learning
Suppression of Emotional Expression
How to Support Authenticity Among Participants
Draw a Cognitive Map to Reassure Those Who Need Some Theory
“You Made Me Feel This Way!”
Warning: The Caretaker May Appear Along with Authenticity
What About the Facilitator’s Emoting in Front of the Group?
Part III: Designing Learning Experiences
10 Structures for Organizing the Content
“Peeling the Onion”
Modules Versus Threads in Curriculum Design
The Model of Experiential Education
The Four-Step Model Is Essential for Multicultural Groups
Application: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
Applying Experiential Education Now, to This Book!
11 Building on What the Learners Know
Who Holds the Knowledge?
Elicitive Tools: The Instruments That Make It Possible
Open-Ended Questions: The Bread and Butter of Direct Education
Tools for Challenge
12 Learning Difficult Material
What Is Difficult?
What Does It Take to Learn a Hard Thing?
13 Sequencing for Maximum Impact
Designing a Workshop with Rank in Mind
The Rhythm of Differentiation and Integration—and Rank
Using the Resource of Days and Nights
Goals Determine Design and Facilitation
14 Accountability in Direct Education
Design for Discomfort
Remember the Introverts!
Raise the Issue of Commitment from the Outset
Negotiated Design
Accountability to the Group or the Goals
Facilitating Risk and Understanding Resistance
And for Those Who Don’t Identify with Sports Coaches?
15 Emergent Design:
Facilitating in the Here and Now
The Mechanics of Emergent Design
Where’s the Accountability?
Stumped in San Francisco: Needing a Diagnosis
Part IV: Facilitation
16 Setting the Tone and Building Safety
Energy and the Initial Encounter
Start Where
They
Are, Not Where
You
Are
The First Session
Those Awkward Moments When the Group Is Regathering
Managing Small Group Activities
Supporting Safety
Outside the Comfort Zone
17 Edgy Interventions to Accelerate Learning
The Freedom to Make Powerful Interventions
Close, But Not Too Close
Confusion and Hostility as Welcome Signs
Handling Deflection
When Only a Few Are Carrying the Ball
18 The Power of Framing
Framing and Reframing Opens Windows for Learning
Understating: Framing to Increase Participation
Framing from the Margin
Storytelling and Generalizing
19 Sensitivity in Cross-Cultural Issues
Learning About the Group and Its Culture
Building Rapport
How the Culture Might Influence Your Design and Facilitation
Hard Questions: A Facilitator’s Checklist
Handling Ourselves When Working Cross-Culturally
The Uses of Being an Outsider
20 The Drama of Transformational Work
Looking for Transformational Moments
Isn’t This Therapy?
What Do I Mean by
Transformation?
Limiting Beliefs Come from Someplace
What Actually Takes Place in Transformational Work?
21 Conclusion: Bringing It All Together
Loving the Content Too Much to Rely on Logic
Direct Education Confronts Common Obstacles to Effective Adult Learning
Diversity and Anti-oppression Work: Intrinsic Rather Than a Compartment
Taking on Limiting Beliefs That Prevent Learning
Authority and Limiting Beliefs
Rank, Authority, and Cross-Cultural Facilitation
Resources
Appendix A: The Sustainable Educator: Advocacy, Modesty, and Diversity of Gifts
Going with Our Strengths
Appendix B: The Sustainable Educator: Resilience and Revolution
Social Movements as a Stimulus to Learning and Sustainability
Progressive Social Movements Sustain Educators as Well as Societies
Big Changes, Little Changes
Peeling the Onion Once More
Appendix C: For Further Reading
Appendix D: Tools and Resources for Direct Education
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Facilitating Group Learning
Strategies for Success with Diverse Adult Learners
George Lakey
Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lakey, George.
Facilitating group learning : strategies for success with adult learners / George Lakey.—1st ed,
p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass Higher and adult education series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-76863-1 (hardback)
1. Adult learning. 2. Group work in education. 3. Learning strategies. 4. Continuing education. 5. Adult education. I. Title.
LC5225.L42.L35 2010
374′.22—dc22
The Jossey-Bass
Higher and Adult Education Series
Acknowledgments
As a working class boy, I’m proud to acknowledge how much this book is a collective product. Kathi Bentall and the Rivendell Retreat in British Columbia invited me to be their first writer-in-residence, kindly affording me the space and time to write the first draft of this book. The board of Training for Change (TfC) excused me from some training and administrative work so that I could write. Daniel Hunter, Judith C. Jones, other co-facilitators, and the staff of many client organizations helped me to learn from my mistakes and successes. They helped me to see that we really were evolving something worth sharing. Some TfC trainers wrote specific contributions to this book—Betsy Raasch-Gilman, Erika Thorne, Matt Guynn, Skylar Fein—and I’m grateful to them for sharing their experience.
The leadership, staff, and worker educators of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers were courageous in making their union a laboratory for many of these ideas. Denis Lemelin, the current CUPW president, was key in introducing the union to direct education, along with David Bleakney and Lynn Bue. Johnny Lapham, Viki Laura List, Carolyn McCoy, Frances and Howard Kellogg, Ann Yasuhara, and many other generous individuals shared not only their purses but also their hearts to keep TfC’s training on the growing edge.
The Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College supported the book project, including my research assistant Markus Schlotterbeck. For a decade and a half Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quakers) supported my ministry for nonviolent training; without that support neither Training for Change nor the book would have happened.
A network of friends and friendly teachers read early drafts and gave me helpful feedback, including Antje Mattheus and Nancy Brigham. I’m lucky to have them as well as all the teachers from whom I’ve learned so much, especially Niela Miller, Rod Napier, and Arnold Mindell. I’ve been helped by the participants in my workshops and classes who took the time to give me feedback.
I dedicate this book to the memory of George and Lillian Willoughby, who passed away during the book’s last year of preparation; they were mentors for me my entire adult life and continued to support education for change well into their nineties. In this same year a new life began: my granddaughter Ella Sophia Goldman. Some of my deepest learnings and greatest joys have come from my family, and I dedicate this book to its members, especially the newest ones: Ella and great-grandsons Christopher Smalls Jr., Yasin Ali, and Zaine Thomas. May they grow up to a world of justice, peace, and environmental harmony.
About the Author
George Lakey is Visiting Professor and Research Fellow, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Swarthmore College. He has led over 1,500 workshops on five continents and authored eight books. He co-founded Training for Change and directed it for fifteen years, which included consulting with labor unions and other adult education programs. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he innovated in a gender-sensitive leadership development curriculum and has wide experience in other anti-oppression work, including with grassroots activists.
1Introduction: Direct Education for Adult Learning Groups
This book is for everyone who assists groups to learn, whether formally or informally, through workshops or courses, as facilitator or teacher or trainer. I wrote it to share a lifetime of confronting mysteries in how individuals learn in groups.
I was twenty when I was first paid to lead learning groups of adults. At first the job was a bit intimidating for me; each Friday in the late afternoon I met fifteen or twenty strangers and led them through a volunteer weekend at a psychiatric hospital so they could be helpful to patients and learn about the mental health system.
I admired the content of the weekend. The volunteers let go of stereotypes, learned skills for relating to mental health consumers as human beings, and got the latest theories on mental illness and treatment from occasional meetings with staff psychiatrists. As a facilitator I found out that the sequence of material and experience mattered a lot to how much the volunteers could learn.
By working with the same setting and same core curriculum but with ever-changing groups, I learned that each group had a personality of its own. I observed how the atmosphere of a group influenced how much and how fast the volunteers learned. I saw that different groups needed differing amounts of help in making their diversity work for them.
The volunteers came from markedly different settings. Most came from the colleges of the region, ranging from state to elite schools. Some participants were out of college and in workplaces, establishing themselves as adults building a life. These subgroups meant a lot in the beginning of each weekend, but then shifts could occur, with new subgroups and new dynamics among them that affected the learning the volunteers were doing.
I found that by accident I had signed onto a laboratory in adult learning, and I was hugely stimulated. I found that learning in groups is not at all straightforward. I had more and more fun wading into the complexity, intuitively experimenting with different approaches and interventions. Even though we had no rigorous evaluation process in place, I could see that the group dynamics very much influenced the learning curve of the volunteers and how much they were willing to risk to achieve their goals.
Thanks to the Quakers who ran this program, I was well-launched on a lifetime quest to evolve a pedagogical approach that could optimize learning in diverse groups. My quest included leading over fifteen hundred courses and workshops for adults, mostly in the United States but including countries on five continents. My journey included teaching in colleges, universities, and graduate schools. The main points of what I’ve learned so far are in this book. I call the approach “direct education.”
Making Our Peace with the Complexity of It All
Luckily, the supervisors in my early teaching and facilitation jobs didn’t tell me at the outset how complex a learning group is! The layered reality dawned on me gradually, at a pace at which I could stay excited about it.
I came to believe that individuals in the learning group learn in different ways from each other: some learn chiefly through their ears (auditory), others through their eyes (visual), some learn mainly through their bodies in motion (kinesthetic), and others learn by making a gut-level connection with the information and the group (emotional). Of course, some tune into a combination of these. I learned that the very concept of “intelligence” has also been re-evaluated, with recognition that broad diversity shows up even in that dimension (Gardner, 1983).
The communication styles and life experiences of different racial and ethnic groups strongly influence how they learn, including what they learn from the same presentation. Gender matters. Class background makes a strong difference; public education levels the playing field only in our dreams.
At one point while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I grew tired of how the students were writing papers, so I substituted journals to see what would happen. After some coaching, most of the thirty-five students wrote deeply personal reflections on their encounters with the course. Our agreement was that they could keep confidential whatever they wanted to, as long as they would share with me four pages a week from their larger journal. As the semester went on and trust grew, more and more divergence of experience was revealed, and by the end I realized that instead of teaching one course, in the experience of the students I was teaching thirty-five courses!
I’ve made my peace with the reality that participants in a learning group pursue their own agendas, whatever my intentions are. At the end of one training of trainers workshop, a young man came to me. “Thank you for the breakthrough I had this weekend in my relationship with my dad,” he said. Surprised, I asked him how he managed that, since nothing of that work had been visible to me.
“Well,” he said, “you reminded me of him from the moment I walked in, and of some of the ways he drives me crazy, and so I used the workshop to confront my issues with him.” He smiled. “I was up half the night with my journal, and I had a breakthrough. So thanks.”
“You’re very welcome,” I smiled back, shaking my head at how much goes on under the surface.
Not only is the facilitator or teacher facing many kinds of diversity—the learners’ agendas, culture and class background, and learning styles are just a few—but there’s another level of influence operating powerfully in most groups: the characteristics of the group itself. Since my first job, this principle has been reinforced through the years to the point that it is one of the things that keeps me from burning out: I can’t get bored in teaching, because the next group will be a new adventure.
Letting Go of the Old Paradigm of Education
Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) argued that when a paradigm is wearing out, people increasingly notice exceptions to the rule. “Yes, the earth is flat, but it’s also true that Columbus made it back to Spain.” “Yes, only violence is capable of overthrowing a dictatorship, but in 1989 some East European dictatorships were overthrown nonviolently.”
The old paradigm of education is also wearing out, and parts of the new paradigm have been emerging in my lifetime. John Dewey (1966) famously insisted that “we learn by doing.” During World War II the U.S. government’s effort to educate families to eat foods formerly wasted discovered that homemakers were far more likely to change through discussion groups than through lectures. Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (1972, 1994) found that peasants learned to read more effectively when he used participatory methods that supported their power; his work flowered into popular education. The activist intellectual Ella Baker gained influence in the U.S. civil rights movement through her brilliant organizing skills and coached the young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to use her version of popular education to empower Southern African Americans to stand up to the Ku Klux Klan (Ransby, 2005).
Some founders of the Movement for a New Society (MNS) were active in the civil rights movement and then in the early 1970s began a training program that became international in scope. Drawing on activist experience, on Freire, and on early insights from mediation training and encounter groups, MNS trained trainers for a variety of groups and published the widely read adult educators’ guide Resource Manual for a Living Revolution (Coover, Deacon, Esser, and Moore, 1977).
Experiential trainers like those who started Outward Bound got life-changing results through group challenges and adventure-based learning. Religious educators made their work come alive through hands-on and participatory methods, which now permeate adult education.
I was lucky to be taught at a young age by a couple of innovators who had begun to tune into the new paradigm of education. They planted seeds that later sprouted; they gave me early personal experience with a model more complicated than that of traditional educators.
Ruth Frederick had a sharp eye and a commanding presence. We fifth graders thought it really was possible that she could see every one of us and at the same time write on the blackboard with her back turned. Unlike some of the dowdy-looking teachers in our school, she wore colorful dresses that fit her snugly, and her brown hair shone as it fell in a wave to her shoulders. Maybe being daughter of the mayor of my town, Bangor, Pennsylvania, added to her air of authority.
Ms. Frederick was full of surprises. She gave each of us a German pen pal—this not long after World War II—and we were soon puzzling about what we could possibly write back to these youngsters with their fractured English and postcards showing strange-looking towns. Another day she took me aside and told me that, instead of reading each of the stories in the fifth-grade reader and completing workbook exercises, I was to choose a few of them and turn them into plays. English class shifted immediately from a chore to a thrill. Finally, she astounded us all one morning when we arrived to find all our desks had been re-organized into a giant circle. “It’s time you look at each other when you speak,” she said. “We need to have real discussions. You’re growing up, you know.”
In eleventh grade I again had one of those rare teachers who had a more complex view of education than the mainstream paradigm. Carmela Finelli, I now realize, looked at us and saw thirty adolescents with scant attention for the names and dates of great American authors. We hungered for knowledge, but not names and dates. We most of all wanted to learn to know ourselves, obscured as we were by awkwardness, anxiety, and competition.
“Finelli,” as we referred to her, had grown up in the Italian town next door to mine. Roseto, Pennsylvania, later became famous among epidemiologists because of its low incidence of stroke and heart disease despite a diet of rich food. A study of Roseto concluded that the closely-knit Italian community itself was one protection against the stress that promotes heart trouble (Bruhn and Wolf, 1979).
Finelli acted as if she knew how to heal our teenage heart trouble, because from the first day she built community in her English classes. Her method sent the message of affirmation. She used small groups for sharing our essays about the authors. She patiently taught the talkative students that our quiet class members had important things to say. She used debate and dialogue to engage us in the great themes in literature: integrity, relationship, individuality, and courage. The class became a learning community of trust and growing self-respect. Of course, Thoreau mattered, and Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Whitman! How had we coped up till now without them?
Lucky me. I did have some teachers who even in the conformist 1940s and ’50s glimpsed the complexity, the multidimensionality of the learning process. Now even Ruth Frederick and Carmela Finelli might be boggled by what pioneers have learned about learning, but I like to think that they would be pioneers today, too, handling in their graceful way the risks and challenges of a learning group.
What Is Direct About Direct Education?
Direct education cuts through the fluff and pretense that distances learners from the subject. It drops unreal expectations—for example, that kinesthetic learners will somehow learn from Power-Point presentations—and unreal assumptions—for example, that a group is simply the sum of the individuals. I call this kind of education direct because it brings focus to the encounter of teacher and group; it replaces scatter—of teacher preoccupied with curriculum and participants preoccupied with distractions—with gathered attention. Direct education takes the most direct path to the learner inthe here and now.
Because this approach builds so strongly on the achievements of popular education, the reader might wonder if there really is a difference. In 2005 I became the chief consultant to a million-dollar leadership education course of the Canadian Postal Workers Union. The course was based on popular education, and it had produced good results in its first dozen years. The union aimed to make it even better. I spent many hours in the back of the room, observing popular education applied to their content, and that woke me up to the distance that direct education has evolved from popular education.
Direct education is highly experiential, using a variety of methods to move participants out of their comfort zones into encounters with new possibilities. Although exercises are structured, they stimulate spontaneous responses rather than demonstrations or rehearsal of previous thinking: facilitators choose interventions that go for the “here and now.”
Direct education is multicultural and integrates perspectives developed by movements against sexism, racism, and the other forms of oppression. As you’ll see in this book, direct education doesn’t compartmentalize “diversity work” but instead merges anti-oppression work into its method, into the very framing of the learning group itself.
Direct education works the four major learning channels as naturally as a circus works its three rings. Unlike both traditional education and popular education, direct education highly values the kinesthetic and emotional learning channels. Content is not organized according to linear logic but instead according to how people actually learn. Direct education understands how natural it is for people to resist learning, even in settings favored by popular educators, and it provides strategies for working with resistance.
The natural rhythms and cycles of groups are used to accelerate learning rather than being ignored or subjected to efforts of control. Conflict is frequently encouraged as a promoter of learning. Direct education integrates lessons from humanistic psychology and group dynamics. Design for courses includes the use of the group as a laboratory in which to try new behaviors and apply new insights.
Working with so many variables swirling around in the learning group opens some participants to a deeper adventure than adding skills and knowledge. Some of them (and sometimes even whole groups) want to unlearn the attitudes that slow them down. Sometimes they want to let go of their emotionally held limiting beliefs! When that door opens, the advanced practitioner of direct education gets to do transformational work. The arena of limiting beliefs is one place where most people hold back their own power. The tools we use for transformational work go to a new level of empowerment.
Direct education was evolved by the trainers associated with Training for Change, a nonprofit organization that works with grassroots and nonprofit groups in the United States, Canada, and over a dozen other countries. Training for Change (http://www.TrainingforChange.org) teaches educators how to invent their own tools and adapt them to their own cultures.
The Method of This Book
Because direct education is a way of handling complexity in a learning group, this book relies partly on stories to show its strategies for success. Stories include more details than expository writing and therefore reveal more nuances and layers of the facilitation process. Narratives include but go beyond articulating principles because they show the unfolding—what really happens when facilitation works.
Stories have been central to my pedagogy since my earliest teaching, and I’m pleased to see that they are achieving greater theoretical legitimacy. In a recent “state of the art” volume, Transformative Learning in Practice, Jo A. Tyler (2009) describes how and why stories work in terms of Jack Mezirow’s adult learning theory.
I do take the precaution of changing many of the names in my stories and sometimes disguising the situations, because of the expectation of confidentiality that usually accompanies this work. I hope that the stories in this book illuminate a twin possibility: admitting the complexity of teaching and shaping the complexity into a journey of discovery which includes fun, struggle, lightness, connection—and joy.
In four main sections the book explores key concepts and tools that make direct education work:
Part I. Traditional education pretends that a class is simply a collection of individuals, even though every aware teacher knows that’s far from true. Part I offers a useful way to understand the relation between the individual and the group, and how to generate synergy. Groups are mysterious; they have secret lives. There are very specific ways that facilitators can influence, and benefit from, the secret life of the group.
Part II. Participants in a learning group are amazingly different from each other, even if they believe they are homogeneous. How is our handling of difference influenced by social class? How is difference acknowledged, supported, or confronted? How can conflicts aid learning? How do we assist emotional expression to support the process?
Part III. Whether the content of the workshop or course is learned depends hugely on the design. Design in traditional education was controlled by logic, and most people forgot the content fairly soon after the end of the course. What are the principles of design that actually work?
Part IV. Good facilitation is more than mechanically implementing a design; it’s more like stalking the teachable moment. How do we make the interventions that heighten the design, experiencing the joy of fine-tuning to stay very close to the developmental life of the group? How does cross-cultural training achieve its goals, when it does? And how do advanced practitioners of direct education do transformational work when participants are stuck and their learning curve is in decline?
Additionally, the book offers four resource appendices. Appendix A addresses educator burnout: how can we thrive in the long run? Appendix B addresses the idealist inside the facilitator and teacher: how do we keep green the vision that motivates us while getting satisfaction from the day-to-day work? Appendix C addresses the teacher as lifelong learner and provides suggestions for further reading to engage the intellectual context of this book, formed as it is by several fields: educational theory, group dynamics, humanistic psychology, and social activism. Appendix D addresses the technician: where to get the detailed instructions for using direct education tools, those that are included in this book and those that aren’t, and what to keep in mind as you apply them.
Part IThe Learning Group and the Individual
2The Role of the Individual and the Group in Direct Education
“Who am I in this group?” is the participant’s preoccupying question as any learning group convenes, and there’s limited capacity for learning anything else until this question is answered. I learned this fundamental principle in my first job, facilitating adult volunteers at a psychiatric hospital. I started out eager to begin the orientation on Friday evening over supper, since there was a lot to cover. I supposed that they would be eager to start and to ask their questions about this strange new adventure. To my surprise, I would have barely launched into the material when I would see some people’s eyes glazing over and others shifting restlessly in their seats. This happened week after week.
As an experiment, one weekend I tried not starting the orientation over dessert. I just watched the group dawdle over their cake, then over the cleanup, and I finally gathered them in the workshop space. By that time they were bursting with curiosity, and we had a clean and efficient orientation, finishing early!
I continued with this new approach and paid more attention to the content of the participants’ interactions over supper and cleanup. Maybe I could learn what was so important about their informal banter and what I was interfering with when I tried to impose what I thought was more important. What I first thought was random conversation among the participants turned out to be very serious indeed: they were establishing a status hierarchy among themselves, and they needed time to do it! Once they’d done that, they could relax and attend to the service learning they’d come to do.
In order to learn, people need to feel safe. In a course or workshop or service learning project, they find safety by creating a social order of some kind. When I moved on to other courses, I noticed that the order some groups created was more effective in supporting the learning than others, and so I began to intervene proactively to shape a supportive atmosphere.
What Makes a Pro-learning Social Order?
When I began to make theory out of this, I realized that in the old paradigm of education, participants in learning groups are left to their own devices to create their informal social order. The traditional teacher may imagine that her or his order is the only one that exists in the classroom, or the only one that counts. What I found, though, was that the order that counts for active learning is the less visible one, consisting in subtle signals among the participants. The participants’ own order can distract from—or even sabotage—the formal learning task.
And so we are forced back to assumptions. I assume that to learn, people need to risk: to revise their conceptual framework, try a new skill, unlearn an old prejudice, admit there’s something they don’t know. To risk, people need safety. To be safe, they need a group and/or a teacher that supports them.
I call the kind of social order that supports safety a “container.” The metaphor of container suggests that it might be thin or thick, weak or robust. A strong container has walls thick enough to hold a group doing even turbulent work, with individuals willing to be vulnerable in order to learn.
I believe that at some level, perhaps unconscious, most participants want to be safe so they can be themselves. Their own deeper learning goals can’t be reached from a place of pretense. They need a strong container to do their best work, to feel proud of themselves, and to experience their power.
Whose Responsibility Is the Container?
In the beginning of every group, the teacher or facilitator gets the job. Even in encounter groups, where the facilitator may sit silent for the first five minutes of the session while the group squirms and begins its journey, the facilitator’s presence is, in effect, holding the container.
In direct education, teachers are proactive. They set up exercises for introductions, do icebreakers to lighten the atmosphere, set up buddy pairs or small support groups. The sooner the group begins to share the job of building and strengthening the container, the better. It’s better for the group; if their work becomes conscious, participants learn how to influence group dynamics. It’s better for the facilitator, because holding the container is only one of her many tasks.
Participants hold and strengthen the container in dozens of ways: non-put-down humor, authentic conversation over breaks, keeping the site cleaned up, admitting confusion, going to a participant who looked puzzled or upset and doing active listening, acknowledging someone’s courage, acknowledging someone’s difference from most people in the group, praying, sharing vulnerably.
To help them to get into the swing of it, positive reinforcement from the facilitator means a lot. For example, during break I might say, “I saw you listening to Kai over lunch—looked like you were giving her something she needed.” “I notice you love to tell jokes, Juan, and your sense of humor doesn’t depend on putting anyone down.”
What’s the point of positive reinforcement? People grow as a result—even on the level of skills! Social psychologist Howard Kirschenbaum set up an experiment at a bowling camp by creating two teams with the same gear and same amount of practice (Cooperrider, Sorensen, Yaeger, and Whitney, 2001). Team 1 spent the day practicing and in the evening viewed videos of their performance, edited to include only things they did well. Team 2 also did daytime practice, but in the evening they were told they were going to learn from their errors of the day by watching videos of their mistakes. Over the week of the experiment both teams were measured for performance. Both teams improved. Team 1 improved 100 percent over Team 2—Team 1 learned 100 percent faster with positive images! Teams were also compared with each other along another dimension. They were rated by how much they did or didn’t affirm the efforts of the less skilled players. Less skilled players performed far better when they were part of a team that cheered them on rather than criticized or corrected them.
My experience even in highly competitive university environments has been that students can sometimes set aside the behaviors that reflect their insecurities and, by halfway through the semester, take some responsibility for holding the container. They are then amazed to find how much they look forward to the class—and how rapidly they learn.
On a good day, participants can use your learning group to discover one of life’s basic truths: we co-create the world we live in.
“There’s No Time for Container Building!”
This claim comes from people teaching a forty-five-minute class or leading a one-hour workshop, but my experience is that skipping container building wastes time. The first five to ten minutes are often wasted while members of the group are thinking about the phone call they made before coming in, or the pressing item on their to-do list that didn’t get done, or why this is their second bad hair day of the week, or how they can make a favorable impression on that attractive person sitting over there. The mere physical presence of a collection of bodies in the room is no indication that someone is learning something.
Instead of wasting time pretending to teach while waiting for minds to arrive, I prefer engaging participants in activities that assist their minds to show up. For some groups the activities may be quite brief. A few questions that are responded to with raised hands (and, if appropriate, a humorous remark) can be enough: “How many of you wish you’d gotten more sleep last night?” “Who here knows more than two other people in the group?” “Who’s wondering how yet another workshop on diversity could possibly make the world a better place?”
Even when I’m asked to give a lecture to a large assembly of people, I find it makes a difference if I ask the crowd to turn to each other in their seats and share, for example, (a) how they heard about the meeting, and (b) something they’re looking to get out of it. After a few minutes of that, the crowd laughs more easily and is more responsive to my lecture. Before turning to the question-and-answer period, again audience members turn to each other to reflect, and sharpen their questions and comments. The buzzing is always intense, with short bursts of laughter and animation on most faces. The Q and A period is then lively and exciting. Even a large crowd of strangers—as mob psychologists have found—can create a container with its own norms and attitudes. The question for the facilitator or teacher is, Are we willing to build a container that supports learning, or simply leave it to the group to go its own way?
I found in teaching college and university courses that building the container was as important for them as for other forms of adult education. For example, at the start of the semester I shared the technique of what I called co-learning. Students paired up randomly. Time was divided equally (in the beginning, we started with ten minutes: five minutes each). Each student pair decided who would talk first, and who would listen. I might offer a suggestion for what to talk about, but usually not. The listener’s job was to pay attention in a focused and affirming way, without asking questions or commenting. The talker’s job was to share whatever he or she wanted to, including feelings if that felt safe. These pairs remained stable over the semester, and I gave co-learning time at least once in each class, often in or near the beginning. I was available to assist if a pair had difficulty settling in. Most pairs grew their trust level rapidly, and some met outside class to use this method for longer periods. As they progressed, the whole group container grew stronger.
One reason a stronger container brings more learning is that participants feel safer in expressing their questions and confusions. Some teachers may believe that when they ask for questions and receive none, they have been amazingly lucid. More likely, the container is simply not strong enough to support the questions participants want to ask. Any learning group, when it is awake, has questions (and not from the same two or three people!). The issue is, Will the container support those questions being voiced?
Let Them Know About the “Comfort Zone”
A concept that directly supports individual learning and the strength of the container is the “comfort zone.” I generally teach this concept very early, in almost every workshop I do.
Each of us has a comfort zone that consists of those habits, beliefs, relationships, feelings, thoughts, and actions that for us are comfortable or familiar. While the comfort zone is reassuring, it can also get stuffy and boring. Humans often leave their comfort zones, for the stimulation and excitement. We may raft on white water, drive too fast, ride a roller coaster, date someone very different from ourselves, or see a scary movie. Some people will pay a great deal of money to become uncomfortable and climb a distant mountain or enter an exotic race.
When leaving their comfort zone, many people check to make sure they’ll be safe: the bungee cord won’t break, the date will happen in a public place. People intuitively know that safety is adifferent issue from discomfort, but they might forget the difference when they are uncomfortable in a course. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard a participant say, “I don’t feel safe,” when what was really meant was “I don’t feel comfortable.”
I use a graphic that puts the “self” in the middle of a large circle, labeling the space inside the circle as the “comfort zone.” The space outside the circle I label “learning zone” in order to emphasize that learning can happen when people venture out, take risks, entertain new thoughts, and do things that feel scary. I stress that my ideal as a teacher is to see participants uncomfortable for most of the course. That usually gets a laugh and discussion, and I return to the point as soon as possible afterward. Then, when a participant complains about feeling uncomfortable, I hasten to congratulate him, point to the comfort zone graphic, and congratulate him again for entering the zone of learning.
Container Building Is Acknowledging Reality
Whether the initial period of container-building takes a short or long time, the common element is acknowledgment: “Some of you may be eager for this course and others wish you were elsewhere … I want to welcome you all.”
Most of the activities invite disclosure from the participants themselves: “How many of you …?” “Turn to your neighbor and tell what motivated you to come here tonight.” “In this mingle, move around the room and see how many people you can meet and share with.”
Container-building is an invitation to be real. It proceeds step by step, through acknowledgment and mutual disclosure. Participants pretend and hide out in the beginning of classes and workshops because they are afraid to be real. By taking small steps, they gain mutual trust and realize they are safe, at least a little bit accepted for who they are and what they think.
When participants are still busy putting energy into pretense—“the good student,” “the avid listener” “the know-it-all”—they have less attention for actual learning. As the container strengthens, they can relax and pay attention to the content of the workshop or class. Learning happens.
3Harnessing the Power of Intention
Goal setting is the activity of a powerful person. Or, to be more accurate, I should say, “Intentional, explicit goal-setting is the activity of a powerful person.” Human beings set short-term goals all the time, and these unconscious goals are often about avoiding pain and seeking pleasure rather than going after their own growth or making a difference.
What accelerates and deepens learning for adults is for goals to become explicit, because the explicitness forces them to choose. What are my personal or professional priorities? In this course, shall I commit to learning this, or that, and how much of what? What is my intention?
Participants cannot become powerful learners while coasting on the objectives set out in the curriculum. Each participant needs to state what it is she or he wants to learn, concretely and realistically. I rarely believe it important for me to know what each person’s goals are, but it is important that someone in the group—a learning buddy or members of a support group—know what each person’s goals are. Witnesses often empower us to be our best.
The very act of creating learning goals reminds participants of their power. In Los Angeles I once spent three hours assisting participants to set realistic and passionate learning goals for themselves. The workshop had tapped into a “go with the flow” crowd, and the participants were languishing in wimpishness, unable to exert force except when angry. For them it was a wonderful contradiction to their culture of resignation to set some goals for themselves, and the hours spent in the beginning paid off in powerful learning.
Taking responsibility is an act of power. Therefore, many who have an investment in their own powerlessness avoid it. They may have been beaten, physically or emotionally, and decided victimhood is their lot. They may be part of an oppressed group and learned to blame the oppressors for all that they lack. They may be activists and believe that power is a zero-sum game and that it is righteous not to have any power. They may have experienced educational abuse and been forced to sit in endless days of boredom by pedants who themselves believed they couldn’t change anything important.
Compassionate teachers and facilitators know that no matter how invested in powerlessness someone is, there’s a reason she got that way and she would love to find a way out. Aren’t we all moved by the story of deaf and blind Helen Keller, a furious child until she discovers that she, too, has the power to learn? Her tutor Anne Sullivan was too compassionate to be gentle with that little girl caught in her victimhood. Sullivan’s toughness enabled Keller to start on a journey that made a difference to the social movements of the day (Keller, 2003),
In a course or a moderately long workshop, midpoint goal checking is important so participants can affirm their progress, modify their goals, or change their strategy to make sure they achieve them. Designing a course to help them revisit their goals helps them to resist getting sucked into a vortex of group-think and to remain on track with their clearest thinking about how, as individuals, they want to grow.
An exercise we frequently use at Training for Change is Maximize/Minimize the Value of a Learning Experience. The facilitator asks participants to recall ways that they have personally found work well when they make full use of a learning opportunity. These aren’t advice to the facilitator; they are methods that diverse individuals have found pay off for themselves, like asking questions, taking notes, or talking about the content at break time. These are listed on newsprint. The facilitator then asks for ways in which they have minimized the value of a learning experience. After a moment of seeming amnesia during which the facilitator says something like, “Come on, it’s honesty time,” participants admit to a variety of methods: telling themselves they know the content already, distracting themselves with a things-to-do list, judging the facilitator, judging other participants, and so on. Of course the facilitator relaxes and elicits this information nonjudgmentally. As participants cop to their methods for reducing the value, smiles of recognition appear frequently and the room loosens up. The facilitator usually asks participants what works to pull themselves back into the “maximizing” mode, and participants are happy to share with each other their secrets for effective learning, which are also listed.
The exercise invites participants to clarify their intention for the course: Do they want to go through the motions, or do they want to learn? It invites them to become accountable to the most important person in their lives, themselves.
