Show care by aligning your needs with your learners' needs.
Sometimes in education, we’re tempted to think that teachers and learners are in competition with one another. As facilitators, it’s easy to feel like we have to cover a certain amount of content in a certain amount of time or that that we have to get through this before we can do that. It causes us anxiety when we try to speed through something our learners resist that we think we must do. It cause our learners anxiety when we do that, too. The promise of a better activity down the line doesn’t do much to relieve the struggle of plodding our way through an activity learners don’t want to do or through content they don’t want to learn. A negative or disengaging experience doesn’t provide proof of a greater payoff down the line.
However, it’s okay to think that we have to teach some things. There are vital concepts and skills our learners need to master to accomplish what they want in life. Our job as facilitators is to show care for our learners by situating those key learning outcomes within the content of their lives and within compelling experiences shared during an event.
Relevance and delight are learning needs. If we can learn enough about facilitation and enough about the audiences we serve, we stand the chance of designing learning experiences that matter to our learners and give them feelings of agency, choice, fulfillment, and joy.
In this section, we’ll think about how to show care through designing authentic, positive experiences for ourselves and our learners.