Facilitating Group Learning: Strategies for Success with Diverse Learners

A vital read for trainers committed to genuine people power. Practical and profound, this book will serve any facilitator working to activate the wisdom, capacities, and protagonism of groups to build winning social justice movements.

—Zein Nakhoda, director and core trainer of Training for Change

In this engaging and accessible book, George Lakey draws on a lifetime of experience to provide a highly practical resource to anyone seeking to understand and respond to the complexities of group work. The book will be invaluable to anyone trying to effect social change through groups, while striving to stay simultaneously sane and employed.

—Stephen D. Brookfield, distinguished university professor, University of St. Thomas

I’ve been working with forms of direct education for many decades, and I found new ideas and inspirations in every chapter. For anyone involved in teaching, training, sharing skills, or leading groups, this book is an invaluable resource!

—Starhawk, author of The Earth Path, Dreaming the Dark, and Webs of Power

George Lakey has inspired our union to engage in education in a way that challenges us to redefine social justice and equality in new and exciting ways. This book helps us to continue our journey to touch the souls of union members.

—Denis Lemelin, former national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers

"Facilitating Group Learning will ease the way of all who venture into the white waters of facilitation. George clarifies the most basic, complex, and nagging challenges of facilitation, while honoring the realities of individual and social power dynamics and providing real-life examples from the path of continued growth and mastery. A rare gift!"

—Niyonu D. Spann, founding president of TRV Consulting and Beyond Diversity 101

This book is a must-read for people who teach adults of any age, no matter what the subject, and who care about doing it in ways that yield deep and abiding learning. Wonderfully well-written and rich with psychological and spiritual insights, as well as practical strategies, it represents the fruits of a lifetime of transformational teaching and learning by one of the foremost adult educators of our time.

—Parker J. Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach, Let Your Life Speak, and The Heart of Higher Education

Hard-won advice for community organizers…. Clear, encouraging, and potentially empowering.

—Kirkus Reviews

Lakey doesn’t make it sound easy, but he employs a reasoned, seasoned perspective to clearly convey principles of organization that have proved their value to activists worldwide.

—Publishers Weekly

I’ve applied the wisdom in this book while teaching high school and middle school students, as well as when training teenager camp counselors. I draw on George Lakey’s masterful storytelling and pithy insights over and over. He returns my attention to the secret life of groups and helps me design student-centered experience where the group dynamics unleash and empower students. It works.

—Jonathan Ogle, high school teacher in the U.S. and abroad

"In contrast to its unassuming title, Facilitating Group Learning contains the toolkit every organizer needs to build the fundamentals of a powerful grassroots group: training, collective decision-making, and heightening its learning curve. The book set me on a path that draws out a group’s intelligence and its awareness that it is more than the sum of its parts."

—Lissy Romanow, director of Momentum

With humor and insight, George distills a lifetime of experiences. His stories speak to anyone wanting to be a better teacher or trainer—even showing the transformational potential of our groups, meetings, and workshops!

—Daniel Hunter, global training associate director of 350.org, author of Climate Resistance Handbook

"Reading Facilitating Group Learning is like sitting around a fire in a storytelling circle with wise and experienced activist educators. George weaves solid pedagogy into stories of learning that cross cultures, contexts, and human experience. CUPE’s union education program is stronger, nimbler, and more relevant as a result of incorporating George’s work."

—Cathy Remus, director of union education for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Canada’s largest union)

George Lakey had a positive, lasting impact on the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, by building the pedagogical foundation for our national education program. The result has been building confidence, celebrating diversity, and harnessing our power for positive social action. His book offers authentic magic for elevating moments of despair into profound, hopeful opportunities for change where all can have a hand on the wheel.

—Dave Bleakney, second national vice president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers

"Facilitating Group Learning is my go-to resource for educators who want to tap into a group’s wisdom. This book translates an experiential pedagogy to text and offers readers clear examples for how to design, implement, and adapt curricula. When you apply direct education in the world, the results reverberate in learners for years."

—Matthew Armstead, core trainer with Training for Change, director of Culture Work Studios

When I need to explain to people what I think good facilitation is about, I give them this book. In some ways, it is a manual grounded in decades of incredible and varied experience. In another way it is a challenge: to see facilitation as a powerful tool in the essential and transformational work of supporting people to take agency over their lives. I hope more and more of us take that challenge and use this as a guide to support us along the way.

—Yotam Marom, trainer and consultant, founder of Wildfire, cofounder of If Not Now

This book offers living examples that are inspiring and insightful. Our International Facilitators Development Program has for years found that George Lakey has an answer for almost every question that both new and more experienced facilitators bring. It’s brilliant, a kind of bible for facilitators.

—Mutima Imani, facilitator trainer for The Work That Reconnects

As a trainer and facilitator, I have found this book to be an invaluable tool in my work! Group dynamics and processes can be complex things, but this book helps you think through how we work together to harvest the wisdom in the room. The book is well laid out and accessible and is a must for any educator!

—Kazu Haga, author of Healing Resistance, founder of East Point Peace Academy

George Lakey’s work helped me grow as a classroom teacher, leading me to new understandings of group dynamics, individual students, and the roles of educators. This book is a must for teachers looking to develop transformational teaching practices.

—Joshua Block, author of Teaching for a Living Democracy, public high school teacher in Philadelphia

Facilitating Group Learning: Strategies for Success with Diverse Learners

George Lakey

This edition © 2020 PM Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-826-3 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-62963-842-3 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934744

Cover by John Yates /www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA

Contents

Foreword

One Manual for Both Education and Training: Introduction to the New Edition of Facilitating Group Learning

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1Introduction: Direct Education for Adult Learning Groups

PART I THE LEARNING GROUP AND THE INDIVIDUAL

2The Role of the Individual and the Group in Direct Education

3Harnessing the Power of Intention

4Strengthening the Container: Subgroups Join the Mix

5The Secret Life of Groups

PART II DIVERSITY, DIFFERENCE, AND EMOTIONS IN GROUP LEARNING

6Acknowledging Difference to Accelerate Learning

7Diversity and Conflict Styles

8Social Class and Diversity

9Authenticity, Emotion, and Learning

PART III DESIGNING LEARNING EXPERIENCES

10Structures for Organizing the Content

11Building onWhat the Learners Know

12Learning Difficult Material

13Sequencing for Maximum Impact

14Accountability in Direct Education

15Emergent Design: Facilitating in the Here and Now

PART IV FACILITATION

16Setting the Tone and Building Safety

17Edgy Interventions to Accelerate Learning

18The Power of Framing

19Sensitivity in Cross-Cultural Issues

20The Drama of Transformational Work

21Conclusion: Bringing It All Together

RESOURCES

Appendix A: The Sustainable Educator: Advocacy, Modesty, and Diversity of Gifts

Appendix B: The Sustainable Educator: Resilience and Revolution

Appendix C: For Further Reading

Appendix D: Tools and Resources for Direct Education

References

Index

Foreword

Mark Leier

This is a dangerous and deeply disturbing book for those of us who teach at post-secondary institutions. It is dangerous because it forces us to face the growing corporatization of colleges and universities. These institutions have always abided by the rules of prudent business. They have tended to the accounts and allocated resources and taken instruction from their political and business masters. But over the last forty years college and university administrators have consciously and eagerly adopted the aims and objectives and means of the corporation. Students are considered customers, and the institutions compete with each other for market share, or, in admin-speak, bums in seats. Since the goods offered for sale are more or less interchangeable, like Pepsi and Coke, the competition is based instead on branding, advertising, and dubious rankings. Students are also considered products, and producing more units more profitably means reducing labor costs. The work process—courses and instruction—are prefabricated and routinized and intensified, with larger and larger classes. Teaching is mechanized, with multiple-choice exams marked by electronic scanners, student response systems, or clickers, and online courses. Labor itself is contracted out, with instructors, many of them women and people of color, part of the precarious gig economy.

The students produced on the assembly line are carefully monitored for quality control, and so students are increasingly scrutinized for plagiarism and cheating. Students must submit their papers to plagiarism detection software companies, and instructors are given complicated instructions for monitoring exams. At my university, instructors were advised to use Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon principle and watch students from the back of the room, not the front. This would, the memo continued confidently, reduce cheating, since students could never be sure they weren’t being observed. That an eighteenth-century idea for prison reform could be seriously promoted as an innovative pedagogical tool says much about the culture of university administrators. Apparently, they are unaware, or pretend not to understand, that a society gets the criminals it deserves. Instead, they create more and harsher penalties—my university invented a new grade, that of FD, for Failed for Academic Dishonesty—as they ignore their direct responsibility for the conditions and pressures that lead to the problem they hope punishment will solve.

Instructors too are often complicit in the depersonalizing of teaching and the infantilization of students. Some are forced to go along as they scramble for precarious jobs and cope with crushing workloads, without the support necessary to resist. Others are eager to assert their power over students. This was brought home to me when a tenured university instructor saw that the book was geared toward diverse adult learners and scoffed, This book is irrelevant; our students aren’t adults.

George does not suggest we treat them as if they were adults. He understands they are adults who have reached the age of consent, voting, signing contracts, and being tried in adult court. If it comes to it, college-and university-aged people will most assuredly be sent off to kill and die in war. While instructors and administrators ignore this, George insists, calmly, confidently, and with much experience, that this is the best place to start our teaching and learning. That wonderfully simple and profound point is subversive and dangerous, because it forces conscientious instructors to confront the hierarchy and the command and control structure of the corporate university.

This is a disturbing book, because it calls on us to reject our assigned roles as assembly line managers. It calls on us to stop relying on our hard-won expertise and command of content to demand authority and attention. Instead of starting with ourselves, we start with the interests, needs, experiences—the expertise—of the people we’re working with. Giving up the privilege we have in the classroom, our authority, our expertise as masters of content, can be deeply unsettling. Haven’t we invested time and money and earned the right to be called doctor and professor, a right to some respect based on what we’ve learned and love and want to share? That’s the reaction of the middle-class intellectual, middle-class by role in the corporate structure, if not family background and income. But democracy is messy. Having people speak and argue presumes equality. That means giving up the authority of our syllabus and content. This book invites us to recognize that, and it is uncomfortable.

The book is largely based on George’s experience working with activists who came together to train with him. As a result, the book assumes that people want to be in the classroom. In our world of prerequisites, mandatory courses, large class sizes, and propaganda disguised as education, this is rarer and rarer at the college and university. This indifferent disrespect of the institution forces people to adopt the weapons of the weak, and the fawning keener, the passive-aggressive student, the vanishing student, and the student rightly suspicious of the power imbalance of the classroom make it clear that it is much more interesting to study subaltern resistance than to have to work with it! But the book has techniques and ideas to help us overcome these survival mechanisms and negative expectations.

They are much different from the hot licks and cheap tricks we often look for to help our teaching: the new icebreaker, the fun group exercise, the innovative assignment. They are different, because they are all grounded in a democratic, radical, subversive pedagogy rather than classroom management. Easy to adopt and use, these techniques have edges that provoke and challenge and push us all to learn and grow.

A final warning about the book. As midline managers in academia, one of the functions of instructors is to de-animate conflicts, both in the classroom and in society. This is summed up in the field of labor relations, in those few places that still have unions and contracts and grievance procedures, with the mantra work now, grieve later. Nothing must be allowed to stop production! As a result, many of us think our classes are successful when conflict doesn’t arise, or when we quell it quickly and peacefully. But democracy is messy. Having people speak and argue on matters that affect them personally is often uncomfortable for us and for our students. As instructors and facilitators, part of our job is to embrace conflict instead of smothering it, while ensuring people are safe and secure enough to take chances. This means giving up the authority of our syllabus and our mastery of content to respect the people we are working with. This crucial part of emancipatory pedagogy inverts the marketing device of experiential learning—come to University X for the experience!—and puts the lived experience of people at the center of teaching. It has less to do with people listening to our voices and more to do with encouraging people to find their own voices. Student-focused learning becomes something people do themselves, not something that is done to them.

And so this dangerous and disturbing book is also an exciting and challenging book. It gives us the chance for genuine creativity and the mutual creation of real knowledge, as well as the tools to empower people. It is filled with wisdom and joy; it is unsettling and restorative; it offers hope and trust and vision. I can’t think of better qualities for a book on teaching.

One Manual for Both Education and Training

Introduction to the New Edition of Facilitating Group Learning

George Lakey

If you are building a social movement focused on an urgent issue, you might think of education and training for the activists as an optional extra, a kind of luxury.

Try to tell that to Serbian youth who lived under Slobodan Milošević’s dictatorship amid a kind of gray despair. They used training to build skills and confidence so they could shine a light to bring him down. Or tell it to the members of the U.S. civil rights movement, whose training in the late 1950s prepared the leadership for the dramatic gains of the 1960s. I joined the training staff for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer to help empower students to take on the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, among other things.

In these cases and others, training often lies below the surface of successful movement organizing. Outsiders might not even know about it. To journalists, training may lack the excitement of confrontations in the street—not worth reporting.

What’s often missed is the empowerment that comes from experiential forms of education and training, the learning curve that expands participants’ chance of reaching the goal.

The pedagogical principles in this book work well for learning less dramatic content in schools and universities. As a professor I’ve used methods in this book to bring a sense of immediacy, igniting the students’ curiosity about what they don’t yet fully understand. I call this approach "direct education, because its design principles and set of tools accelerate learning by energizing the group to assist its members. The facilitator—whether called a teacher or a trainer"—supports participants taking more responsibility for the depth of their learning.

Since we developed direct education, I’ve seen the methodology used to teach bookkeeping and poetry-writing, speech-making and racial equality, fundraising and history. It’s been used by teachers from middle school to grad school.

Direct education has been effective with an astonishing variety of groups: top city officials and prison inmates, rural Thai villagers and London anarchists, African National Congress activists and Canadian postal workers, young Mohawk warriors and wealthy Bostonians, Buddhist monks and Russian LGBT activists.

Conflict exists in groups whether the members are conscious of it or not. Direct education, surprisingly, supports the emergence of conflict, then assists the group to expand to a new level of performance and eagerness to learn. Direct education can do this because it appreciates difference. It offers tools that allow learning groups to break through a collective inclination to pretend sameness, an inclination that allows for mediocrity. This book shows how diversity/anti-oppression work uses direct education to go beyond shame and blame, shifting to what anti-oppression movements were originally seeking: liberation.

In so doing, this book supports an alignment of vision for both personal growth and positive social movements: the shedding of ignorance, fear, and oppression through a comradeship of learners who expand in power and truth.

Acknowledgments

As a working class boy, I’m proud to acknowledge how much this book is a collective product. Kathi Bentall and the Rivendell Retreat in British Columbia invited me to be their first writer-in-residence, kindly affording me the space and time to write the first draft of this book. The board of Training for Change (TfC) excused me from some training and administrative work so that I could write. Daniel Hunter, Judith C. Jones, other co-facilitators, and the staff of many client organizations helped me to learn from my mistakes and successes. They helped me to see that we really were evolving something worth sharing. Some TfC trainers wrote specific contributions to this book—Betsy Raasch-Gilman, Erika Thorne, Matt Guynn, Skylar Fein—and I’m grateful to them for sharing their experience.

The leadership, staff, and worker educators of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers were courageous in making their union a laboratory for many of these ideas. Denis Lemelin, the current CUPW president, was key in introducing the union to direct education, along with David Bleakney and Lynn Bue. Johnny Lapham, Viki Laura List, Carolyn McCoy, Frances and Howard Kellogg, Ann Yasuhara, and many other generous individuals shared not only their purses but also their hearts to keep TfC’s training on the growing edge.

The Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College supported the book project, including my research assistant Markus Schlotterbeck. For a decade and a half Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quakers) supported my ministry for nonviolent training; without that support neither Training for Change nor the book would have happened.

A network of friends and friendly teachers read early drafts and gave me helpful feedback, including Antje Mattheus and Nancy Brigham. I’m lucky to have them as well as all the teachers from whom I’ve learned so much, especially Niela Miller, Rod Napier, and Arnold Mindell. I’ve been helped by the participants in my workshops and classes who took the time to give me feedback.

I dedicate this book to the memory of George and Lillian Willoughby, who passed away during the book’s last year of preparation; they were mentors for me my entire adult life and continued to support education for change well into their nineties. In this same year a new life began: my granddaughter Ella Sophia Goldman. Some of my deepest learnings and greatest joys have come from my family, and I dedicate this book to its members, especially the newest ones: Ella and great-grandsons Christopher Smalls Jr., Yasin Ali, and Zaine Thomas. May they grow up to a world of justice, peace, and environmental harmony.

About the Author

George Lakey is Visiting Professor and Research Fellow, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Swarthmore College. He has led over 1,500 workshops on five continents and authored ten books. He co-founded Training for Change and directed it for fifteen years, which included consulting with labor unions and other adult education programs. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he innovated in a gender-sensitive leadership development curriculum and has wide experience in other anti-oppression work, including with grassroots activists.

1

Introduction

Direct Education for Adult Learning Groups

This book is for everyone who assists groups to learn, whether formally or informally, through workshops or courses, as facilitator or teacher or trainer. I wrote it to share a lifetime of confronting mysteries in how individuals learn in groups.

I was twenty when I was first paid to lead learning groups of adults. At first the job was a bit intimidating for me; each Friday in the late afternoon I met fifteen or twenty strangers and led them through a volunteer weekend at a psychiatric hospital so they could be helpful to patients and learn about the mental health system.

I admired the content of the weekend. The volunteers let go of stereotypes, learned skills for relating to mental health consumers as human beings, and got the latest theories on mental illness and treatment from occasional meetings with staff psychiatrists. As a facilitator I found out that the sequence of material and experience mattered a lot to how much the volunteers could learn.

By working with the same setting and same core curriculum but with ever-changing groups, I learned that each group had a personality of its own. I observed how the atmosphere of a group influenced how much and how fast the volunteers learned. I saw that different groups needed differing amounts of help in making their diversity work for them.

The volunteers came from markedly different settings. Most came from the colleges of the region, ranging from state to elite schools. Some participants were out of college and in workplaces, establishing themselves as adults building a life. These subgroups meant a lot in the beginning of each weekend, but then shifts could occur, with new subgroups and new dynamics among them that affected the learning the volunteers were doing.

I found that by accident I had signed onto a laboratory in adult learning, and I was hugely stimulated. I found that learning in groups is not at all straightforward. I had more and more fun wading into the complexity, intuitively experimenting with different approaches and interventions. Even though we had no rigorous evaluation process in place, I could see that the group dynamics very much influenced the learning curve of the volunteers and how much they were willing to risk to achieve their goals.

Thanks to the Quakers who ran this program, I was well-launched on a lifetime quest to evolve a pedagogical approach that could optimize learning in diverse groups. My quest included leading over fifteen hundred courses and workshops for adults, mostly in the United States but including countries on five continents. My journey included teaching in colleges, universities, and graduate schools. The main points of what I’ve learned so far are in this book. I call the approach direct education.

Making Our Peace with the Complexity of It All

Luckily, the supervisors in my early teaching and facilitation jobs didn’t tell me at the outset how complex a learning group is! The layered reality dawned on me gradually, at a pace at which I could stay excited about it.

I came to believe that individuals in the learning group learn in different ways from each other: some learn chiefly through their ears (auditory), others through their eyes (visual), some learn mainly through their bodies in motion (kinesthetic), and others learn by making a gut-level connection with the information and the group (emotional). Of course, some tune into a combination of these. I learned that the very concept of intelligence has also been re-evaluated, with recognition that broad diversity shows up even in that dimension (Gardner, 1983).

The communication styles and life experiences of different racial and ethnic groups strongly influence how they learn, including what they learn from the same presentation. Gender matters. Class background makes a strong difference; public education levels the playing field only in our dreams.

At one point while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I grew tired of how the students were writing papers, so I substituted journals to see what would happen. After some coaching, most of the thirty-five students wrote deeply personal reflections on their encounters with the course. Our agreement was that they could keep confidential whatever they wanted to, as long as they would share with me four pages a week from their larger journal. As the semester went on and trust grew, more and more divergence of experience was revealed, and by the end I realized that instead of teaching one course, in the experience of the students I was teaching thirty-five courses!

I’ve made my peace with the reality that participants in a learning group pursue their own agendas, whatever my intentions are. At the end of one training of trainers workshop, a young man came to me. Thank you for the breakthrough I had this weekend in my relationship with my dad, he said. Surprised, I asked him how he managed that, since nothing of that work had been visible to me.

Well, he said, you reminded me of him from the moment I walked in, and of some of the ways he drives me crazy, and so I used the workshop to confront my issues with him. He smiled. I was up half the night with my journal, and I had a breakthrough. So thanks.

You’re very welcome, I smiled back, shaking my head at how much goes on under the surface.

Not only is the facilitator or teacher facing many kinds of diversity—the