2.6: Facilitator

Educators facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement of the ISTE Standards for Students. Educators:

a. Foster a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings.
b. Manage the use of technology and student learning strategies in digital platforms, virtual environments, hands-on makerspaces or in the field.
c. Create learning opportunities that challenge students to use a design process and computational thinking to innovate and solve problems.
d. Model and nurture creativity and creative expression to communicate ideas, knowledge or connections.

This entire standard’s attention to facilitating learning that focuses on student ownership, increasing tech use for student learning strategies, and creating opportunities to challenge students are all so important in educating the 21st century child. However, I found myself constantly drawn to indicator D throughout my program: “model and nurture creativity and creative expression to communicate ideas, knowledge or connections”. I just love the focus of bringing students into the center of their own learning and allowing them to have choice and creativity while taking charge of their own learning. And while this is the hope with ISTE 2.6: Facilitator, it can be a challenging journey to get to this point. It can be hard to let go of the reins in the classroom and shift your focus from the leader to the facilitator. One way that I found I could begin to step into this role of learning facilitator vs. learning leaders was to begin utilizing rubrics in my classroom. And I don’t mean using rubrics the way I had previously been using them… just as a grading method after students turned in their work. But I began focusing on students creating their own rubrics, and students using rubrics as a metric to self-assess their learning. Read about this shift in my position in my post, Student Ownership with Rubrics.

Another piece of work that I completed during the DEL program that addresses facilitating learning that attends to all 4 of these indicators is a global collaborative project, Reimagining A “Classroom”. This project gave students the opportunity to design their own classroom, focusing on what the most important aspects of learning is to them.