Week 6: Continuing the role of facilitator

Welcome to week six, the final week of the course!

This week will look at the headway that has been made and invite you to share the outcomes or the progress of your learning and importantly - your facilitation plan. We will discuss how you will continue your role as facilitator in your setting and support your colleagues in continuing to develop their dialogic approaches beyond their first reflective inquiries. Your objective this week is to articulate how you will support your colleagues to address aspects that need improvement (i.e. their findings from their inquiries), and when / how you will review the facilitation model and process itself to consider what was learned and what can be improved.

At the end of this week you should have a completed facilitation in plan in place, which you will need to submit in order to receive a Certificate of Completion. This does not need to be a perfect plan – indeed, there is no perfect, standard plan. They will all look completely different from facilitator to facilitator and context to context so stay focused on what would be helpful for you and your setting.

Focus of the week

Download the video content in written form here.

Read

This week’s readings and resources are as follows:

• Facilitator resource 1: This resource was also shared in week 1 and is a step-by-step cycle to support you during your facilitation planning. For this week, complete step 3 in the cycle and think through how you will address steps 4, 5, and 6.
• Facilitator resource 2: This resource provides guidance in supporting your colleagues inquiries and an editable, blank template is included in the document for you to fill out. It was also provided in the Week 4 materials.
• Facilitation plan template: This is a template of a potential facilitation plan framework that you can fill out (adjusting elements where required according to your setting) and submit to receive your Certificate of Completion. It was also introduced in Week 1.
• Facilitator self-audit of practice: This is a questionnaire that you should fill out before and after your facilitation of your colleagues’ reflective inquiries to monitor strengths, limitations and impact.

Because this is the last module, I have also included some additional sites for you to find more information and resources regarding educational dialogue for you to share with your colleagues, however this list is not exhaustive so make sure that you do your own searching as well!

• Edudialogue.org: This website is a community hub built for practitioners and researchers interested in sharing insights, resources and support regarding the use of educational dialogue in their settings. Take a look through the site for more information about educational dialogue and helpful tools and resources for enhancing the use of dialogue in your educational setting.
• DIALLS: DIALLS is a project that supports the development of dialogue and argumentation in young people across nine countries. This includes an excellent library of numerous tools and resources.
• ED:TALK Toolkit: This toolkit offers structured support and resources for primary or secondary teachers. It can also be used by school leadership staff to support the continuous professional development of teachers.
• The Thinking Together Project, which offers very helpful resources for exploratory talk
• For more information on accountable talk, see The Teacher Toolkit
• CEDiR Lesson Videos Resource Bank
• Robin Alexander’s work on Dialogic Teaching
• For more information on dialogic space amongst other fascinating areas of educational dialogue, visit Rupert Wegerif’s blog
• T-SEDA: You will all be familiar with the materials, but I’m adding this link here for easy access to the pack, additional resources, editable templates, and further description of the T-SEDA team and research.

Do

Your main task for this week is to finalise your facilitation model and plan. Use the resources above to help fill in any gaps, however please do remember that this will likely be a living resource so don’t worry if it doesn’t look final! It may also be helpful to split your plan into short-term and medium-term goals and activities. You can provide a completed version of the facilitation plan template or you can also present your facilitation plan in another shape of your choosing (e.g. a diagram, a narrative overview, an audio recording of your explanation of your model). The priority is for your learning output to be useful to you so please choose whatever mode is most helpful.

Your final facilitation plan can be submitted by emailing it to me directly: meb78@cam.ac.uk. Self-paced students can receive a Certificate of Completion as well by emailing me with their finalised facilitation plan.

Please also fill out the post-course survey about your experience in the course. Your insights will be extremely helpful for my research and desire to create meaningful materials that are genuinely helpful for practitioners! Please note that you do not need to have completed all course materials in order to fill in the survey.

If you’re interested in joining one of the upcoming MOOCs mentioned in the video, you can register here.

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