Training Goals
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Facilitators will gain a basic understanding of practice-based facilitation and the three facilitation pathways.
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Facilitators will practice identifying engagement categories for a specific open-ended exhibit and the associated practices visitors may engage with.
Training Guide
Introduce Practice Based Facilitation (PBF). Practice-based learning is when visitors learn through engagement in the practices of a discipline. PBF centers these practices within facilitation to encourage visitors to deepen their engagement with the practices. For this training, we use the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as a starting point for identifying practices. Introduce these nine practices and encourage participants to reflect on whether these practices are relevant to your institution and identify what practices are missing from this list.
Establish Engagement Categories. In PBF, facilitators need to deeply understand the ways a visitor might engage with an exhibit and which practices they might use. Introduce engagement categories to the participants using the Roll-it-Wall exhibit example provided.
Afterwards, divide participants into pairs or small groups and select an open-ended exhibit in your museum. Using the PBF Engagement Categories worksheet, have each group identify the different engagement categories visitors might engage in and write them down in the leftmost column. Then teams should mark which of the practices a visitor might engage with within each level of engagement. Remind participants that not all practices may be observable.
Have each group briefly share out their facilitation matrices.
Introduce the Facilitation Pathways. Now that participants have identified engagement categories and their associated practices, we can intentionally choose one of the three PBF pathways to facilitate an experience:
- Change Engagement: Facilitators maximize a visitor’s engagement by helping the visitor interact with the exhibit in more complex ways. Alternatively, a facilitator who sees a visitor struggling may prompt the visitor to focus on interacting with the exhibit in a simpler way to build foundational understanding and reduce frustration. A facilitator choosing this facilitation pathway may ask questions, offer observations, or suggest challenges that encourage the visitor to do something different with the exhibit.
- Expand Practices: Facilitators expand a visitor’s use of practices by encouraging the visitor to employ a practice that he or she may not be using. A facilitator choosing this facilitation pathway may ask questions, offer observations, or give prompts that encourage visitors to use an additional practice.
- Optimize Practice: Facilitators optimize a visitor’s use of a specific practice by encouraging the visitor to increase the sophistication of a practice he or she is already using. A facilitator choosing this facilitation pathway may, for example, prompt the visitor to refine their question to be testable, limit the number of variables changed, or challenge the visitor to observe in specific ways.
Talk moves are a way to approach these facilitation pathways. Encourage discussion about when a facilitator might use each of these talk moves.
Apply the PBF Pathways. In the same small groups as before, ask participants to consider a visitor at each engagement category and brainstorm how they might facilitate each of the three pathways. If time permits, encourage participants to observe visitors on the floor interacting with the exhibit. Ask them to identify what engagement category the visitor is using and how they might facilitate one of the three pathways.
As a whole group, reflect on what works well and some challenges with applying PBF to facilitation of each exhibit.
Optional Homework
Participants should spend time on the floor observing visitors and trying to identify the engagement category that the visitors are using.
Then ask them to try to facilitate at least one interaction by (1) Asking a question that would prompt the visitors to engage in a different engagement level and a second interaction by (2) Asking a question or set of questions that would help the visitors add a practice they aren't already using.
Have them reflect on this experience and write up what happened during their facilitation attempts.