Why Teachers should be a Facilitator
But before we talk about how the teacher can be a facilitator, we must comprehend the meaning of a facilitator. A facilitator is a person who assists a group of people in comprehending their common targets and in accomplishing them without any intervention on his/her behalf.
Therefore, when we say the teacher has to play the role of a facilitator in the classroom, this means that the teacher should not be the king who controls the activities of the learners. He/she should permit and authorize the learners some space to let the spirits of creativity and innovation challenged.
In other words, the learners must get involved in active participation that would be represented sbd affected in contentious discussions and teamwork activities, so that the process of learning becomes comprehensive.
Teachers should exert effort in making their classes vitally utile, as the learner must gain new knowledge at the end of every class. The classes should usually start with a warming-up activity that would take few minutes so that the learners’ participation can be guaranteed.
At the same time, this activity would indirectly stimulate the inactive learners to participate in the activity. If the class is a reading comprehension class, the learners have to be divided into groups. Then all the groups discuss the topic of the text without the teacher intervention. This helps to foster effective collaboration.
As a facilitator, teachers can correct the misinformation or give helpful tips that clarify some vague matters in the text. The vocabulary is to be looked up by the learners. The teacher can just give the learners some off-site and online references that would help them find the meanings of the difficult words.
If the class is a grammar class, the teacher may want to start the class by giving the learners a text that will target the grammatical point that will be explained in the class after dividing them into groups. Then the teacher can ask the learners to tell her about their observation and then the teacher takes from here to elaborate on the text that would help them realize how the grammatical rule can be applied.
Also, the et your learners attempt to correct their own mistakes instead of offering the corrections on a silver platter especially if the class is related to writing skills.
Finally, being a facilitator in a classroom means being a successful teacher. This means that one builds constructionist classes where there are mutual positive and active responses from the teacher and the learners, and even among the learners themselves within the one classroom.
Adeyinka Meduoye
