Teaching, Training, Facilitating

“The session felt

less like a session about teaching the model,

and more like a theme.”

Every other week, I join a Zoom-based Systemic Modeling practice group. Last month, I agreed to facilitate the session and to practice teaching the Triune Brain model. This is the model that I am least comfortable with, and so I wanted to experience what it would be like to teach it in a way that felt okay to me. I followed through, and at the end the Clean Feedback that I received included the point that the way I ran the session felt more like the facilitation that happens when running a theme than like teaching a model. A simple explanation for this would be that so far in Level 1 practice I’ve only done running a theme, but I think that this feedback pointed to a pattern.

For several years, I tried to develop a method for developing self-expression that I called Graphic Narrative Play. Thanks to Yuko Takahashi at Hana House, I was able to work with 4-6 year-olds and their parents once a month. The class caught on with a few families, but most tried a few times and then quit. As I tried to understand why this was happening, I learned that in Japanese educational thinking, there is a distinction made between 基礎 (fundamentals/basics) and 応用 (application). Tests that children take distinguish between 基礎問題 (kiso mondai; fundamental problems) and 応用問題 (ōyō mondai; application problems), and the application problems are known to be harder. Of course, the general idea that one should start with the basics and then practice applying them to solve more complex problems exists everywhere, but I started to wonder if maybe families were expecting me to make a clear distinction between lower level fundamentals and higher level application. I decided to make a booklet in which I explained Graphic Narrative Play in terms of levels, processes, and goals.

For the purpose of this post, it’s not worth going through all the details of the above (feel free to comment and ask questions). What is most relevant is what I wrote on the back page.

To summarize, I was making the point that at a frequency of one time per month, I could not rigorously sequence the learning so that all fundamentals would be learned and then we would move on to application. I would teach with a “just in time” approach — providing new knowledge as the need for it emerged from a child’s desire to express something.

In my mind, this “just in time” approach was linked to what I knew of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” (ZPD). I thought of both my role and those of the parents in the room as being “More Knowledgeable Other (MKO)s” for the children, and therefore able to help them to learn more than they otherwise could on their own.

The key point here is that I wasn’t just thinking of myself as a teacher for the children. I was thinking of myself as being a resource (an MKO) for everyone in the room, including the parents so that parent-child pairs could more effectively work in the ZPD. I was also a facilitator insofar as I managed the process. And this combination of being a facilitator (who designs and manages a session) and a resource (a more knowledgeable other who provides just in time information in the zone of proximal development) is how I understood teaching and how I prefer to teach.

Fast-forward to now, and I can see why the principle of adjacency in Systemic Modelling has made so much sense to me. Working with the models is easiest for me when I can provide them just in time in response to something that has just happened and that feels adjacent to / in the ZPD what is going on for the people in the room. For me, this feels like teaching. Just as I found with Graphic Narrative Play, however, not everyone experiences this as being taught.

Although I still believe in so much of what I was doing with Graphic Narrative Play, I gave up on it as something that I could package and provide as a paid service. I don’t want to do that with Systemic Modelling, and so I’ve been reading about teaching, facilitating, training, coaching, and consulting in an effort to understand the full range of how these words might be understood. I found the following chart to be particularly helpful.

https://www.slideshare.net/caldwdo/trainer-consultant-or-facilitator

I realized that I want to acquire the skillsets and flexibility to be able to change my behavior so that I can take on any one of these three roles at will. Of the three, trainer feels hardest for me. To loop back to the beginning of this post, I think that that’s why I received the feedback “The session felt less like a session about teaching the model, and more like a theme.” I was not acting as a trainer. Whether that was a problem or not is a different matter. The fact remains that my default and preferred method of teaching is most similar to facilitation, and if there are circumstances that call for an approach that is closer to training, I’m going to struggle to do it.

This coming weekend, I’ll be participating in my second Level 1 Systemic Modelling course. Again, it will be with Marian Way, although this time the primary language will be Japanese, with English translation provided as necessary. Because of the language burden for me as a non-native Japanese speaker, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to consciously work on acting as a trainer versus a facilitator, but I will try. Or at the very least I will be noticing when others do it and trying to pick up hints.