A couple of years ago I learnt this expression in one of the courses I’ve attended and have been paying attention to how facilitative I am as a teacher. Last year I took part in a conference where this question was asked by the workshop leader: please raise your hand if you think you’re truly a facilitator teacher. I think I was the only one who raised their hand and because of it I’ve kept inspecting whether I truly am.
While checking myself I found the following picture on the Internet to show the differences between a teacher and a facilitator:
(Source: https://info.xseededucation.com/six-ways-you-can-transform-yourself-from-a-teacher-to-a-facilitator/)
For me, facilitating means that I can lean back and simply watch how my students work (moving from the centre to the side). As I mention at another point, I can achieve it with very thorough planning and creating a guiding ppt, where I only have to show them the slide we’re working on, giving them instructions and asking them guiding questions. If these are interesting enough, my students will start to work, and I can really lean back and only observe how they work and who needs help.
I started to open up to my students more when I realised they’re not so much interested in the questions in the book, but rather liked talking about fashion (especially the girls) or sport (for mostly the boys). So, I started to initiate conversations outside the classroom about the clothes they were wearing (“How lovely your pullover is! Is it new? Is it your favourite? Where did you get it? I’d really like something like that myself.) This way they could engage in discussions with me in the lessons, and there we could talk about other things, more closely connected to the materials coming up in the book, more openly.