The stance colour chart
This is a tool to help us situate ourselves : the stance colour chart allows us to position ourselves as trainers in order to clarify the stance we want to adopt in a given space.
It is useful to reflect on our position in providing content, and it can also help us make remarks on training sessions
Train - Moderate - Facilitate : the colour chart
For each of your face-to-face training scenarios, position yourself on the following colour chart.
In order to identify our stance and adjust it, it can be useful to be able to situate ourselves between the different terms and what they represent. To do this, we can use the following colour chart (the inverted commas are etymological references to situate us, they are not definitions) :
The colour’s shade indicates the density of the content to be transmitted :
• As a trainer : educational objectives are set, a content — whether technical or theoretical-political — is identified. The concentration of knowledge is therefore dense -> our stance can therefore be very oriented towards transmission (which does not necessarily imply a top-down format !).
• As a moderator : everybody shares their content but objectives are set beforehand. The degree of content oscillates between the facilitator (who can make contributions, give his or her opinion, who has defined the objectives....) and the participants (who significantly contribute to the content and the construction of knowledge).
• As a facilitator, you do not directly contribute to the content, you do not have objectives for the group : on the contrary, you wrap it up, you facilitate the exchange between participants and peer-to-peer learning.
Why asking these questions ?
To distinguish between the terms "train", "facilitate" and "moderate" is not obvious. We tend to use them randomly, whereas they often imply a difference in terms of :
• relationship to the knowledge / content to be transmitted
• stance / positioning / attitude to adopt in front of the group
There is no hierarchy between the different stances ; identifying the degree of content enables us to think about the teaching situations in terms of the context : the place of the content to be transmitted, the trainer’s position, etc. And thus, avoid certain contradictions by stating our teaching intentions from the outset.
It is not a rigid framework as we can navigate from one to the other, at the same time or between two face-to-face teaching spaces.
Objectives :
- To identify the place of knowledge in specific training situations..
- To question the stance to adopt in these training situations.
Practical use :
- Individually, before a session.
- In a group, during the analysis of future face-to-face training sessions.
