Facilitators

In my opinion the facilitator approach of teaching can have many benefits. Instead of having rows of desks a classroom might have the desks in clusters or even use tables. I see a facilitator teacher as one who would encourage the students to talk and discuss various topics. The classroom would be centered around the students rather than the teacher and I think manipulatives would be involved in many lessons. Teachers would could to know the background of their students, ethnicity, culture, likes dislikes, etc and would then relate the material to the students and how it benefits them.

The hard part about doing this, is that if a teacher has 30 plus students per class and even up in the hundreds per day, the time it would take to personally get to know every students background would be enormous. Other problems might come in the form of actual teaching or teaching by topic. There are some instances where a straight forward executive approach may benefit the students more than the facilitating approach such as in mathematics.