Designing who speaks, and what a facilitator cannot borrow

The rules I changed while the game ran

A ten-week certifying practicum at a Vancouver secondary school: two blocks of Senior Transitional English and one of Composition 10. Two of the three were ELL classes, and each held at least one student with an individual education plan. We were reading Animal Farm, so I built a Jeopardy game to review it.

Before the first question. Two teams, a designated speaker, answers given as a team. My School Advisor logged it as she saw it: “yes, that will encourage the reticent students to participate.”
Partway through. Not enough. New rule: the speaker had to go around the team and ask every member before giving an answer.
1:14. Changed again, so that only the designated speaker could get up and go around the circle, and I said why out loud while doing it: “I want to make sure everyone speaks.” The students pushed their chairs closer together, which my School Advisor logged as “a sense of community”.
1:30. The game had not finished. I stopped it where it stood.

Of everything in those ten weeks that is the lesson I am proudest of, and there were more polished ones after it. As much as we may try to plan a lesson, the ability to make appropriate last-minute adjustments is what makes it a differentiated one.

Nobody in the room chose to be there

A class is a group of people who did not pick the topic, did not pick each other, and cannot leave. One will talk for the whole session if permitted, and the two with the most useful thing to say will not say it unless the structure asks them directly. My Faculty Advisor recorded the same population in different words: “students who are introverted, timid, shy, and often non-participatory.” Waiting for them to volunteer is itself a design, and it produces silence from them and a transcript of everyone else.

Every sentence there describes a stakeholder workshop: the supervisor sent by her manager, the finance lead who has already decided, the frontline person who knows where the process breaks and does not expect to be asked.

What the ten weeks left me

the room, three timesOut of my School Advisor's rows of pairs, into groups of Vs, then into groups of four.
circle discussionsNon-writing, completely verbal, non-hierarchical, and balanced between accommodating social anxiety and creating the occasion for public speaking.
my share of the talkingRoughly twenty per cent.
evidence, not assumptionThe practicum carried a formal inquiry question, so the choices were tested: formative assessment, summative results run A/B, and weekly anonymous feedback from all three classes.
what I concludedNarrower than a case for modifying things. A modification is not an improvement by itself; a mode of delivery designed around the audience and the goal is generally the right track.
how far it has travelledA 35-minute lunchtime session introducing teachers to generative AI on 19 April 2024, then three professional development sessions on AI in the classroom on 17 May, after the practicum ended. Adults, a prepared topic, nobody's budget in the room.

The authority does not travel with you

A teacher is granted the room; a facilitator borrows it, and the loan can be called. I never had to earn the right to set the agenda, decide when a topic was finished, or say the last word on what had been agreed. The technique is unchanged and the thing underneath it is gone.

Four classroom moves, what each one is when the school issues the authority, and what the same move becomes in a room where nobody has.
the same move	in a classroom	in a room of stakeholders
calling on someone	care, and the assessment makes it material	a claim to power by someone who has none
asking them to say it back	checking for understanding	announcing that the correct version is mine
the closing summary	a recap that becomes the record	deciding what the room decided
a question with a known answer	how teaching is built, on purpose	a wall of notes agreeing with whoever walked in

The technique survives the move; the grant does not Nothing in the left column changes. The last row is the expensive one, and the one eight years of practice has trained me to do without noticing.

Standing back is not the fix: a room with nobody steering becomes the meeting it was called to replace. A teacher's authority sits in the person and a facilitator's in the structure, which therefore has to carry more. Change the seating, change the format, rewrite the rules of the game while it is running. None of that requires anyone to obey me. It requires the activity to be built so the confident cannot take the whole of it. That is the part I expect to survive the move.

Still figuring out

I ran out of clockMy biggest growth area, by my own assessment at the end of the practicum, was estimating how long an activity needs. Every mechanism above costs minutes, and the Jeopardy game is the one that did not finish.
the incentive pointed the wrong wayI had announced a one per cent boost to the winning team's final grade. My School Advisor put the question in her log: “consider why you are offering this 1%. The students seemed engaged already. Is there a need for such an incentive? Consider the message you are sending, that those lucky enough to be on the winning team get 1% even though he or she may not have contributed at all.” I built a mechanism to spread the speaking around, then hung a reward on it that paid for the right team rather than a voice. The game stopped unfinished and the 1% went out anyway.
I may be reading the room worse than I thinkSome students do not explicitly and proactively display misunderstanding, and my remedy was stronger rapport and more checking questions, neither of which is a way of noticing. If a room does not announce itself to me over ten weeks, with their written work in my hands as a second opinion, I do not know why I would read it better in a room I meet once.
a rule of mine was bindingEveryone in those classes had to be there and had to do what the activity said. Force the distribution on adults who have rank and the polite form of refusal is participation that costs them nothing: the words arrive, the position does not. That and a real contribution look the same from the front of a room, and I have no instrument that separates them.

I have not stood in a room of stakeholders yet. Eight years of teaching did not give me the practices facilitation has had for decades; it gave me the reason they exist, learned by watching what a room does when participation is left to chance.