Well what a good start to the week. If you follow my blog regularly you will know that on Saturday I was Best Man at my son James’s wedding to Nicola. It was a fantastic day, and everything was just perfect.  Happy Days!

On Monday I was teaching lesson planning to a group of lecturers from a local college.  We had a really interesting discussion talking about all sorts of things from the attention span of delegates to how to ask a question so as to involve the whole group.  As I indicated last week we also spent quite a lot of time talking about John Heron’s Six Category Intervention Analysis and then the Facilitator style model.  I also introduced them to my Best Practice example, BBC News at Ten.  It follows most of the models of learning really well, and sets an amazing example in terms of visual aids, length of items and recapping. The old adage ‘Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you have told them. The BBC does this so well!

I tasked the group with a couple of quick group tasks which they threw themselves into and produced some great results.  During the Round Robin mop up at the end of the session they came back with some really interesting ‘One thing I have learnt today’ including I am going to watch the BBC news tonight and see how it all relates.  I hope they did, because it all did perfectly.  Thank you BBC!              

Well what a week  it has been! My son gets married at the weekend and the family are all gearing up for the big day.  The first working day back after the wedding I am doing some staff development at a local college.  I am going to build my session around John Heron’s excellent model of 6 Category Intervention Analysis and the 6 Facilitator Styles  that go with it.  In my research I have ask around about who is familiar with the two models and much to my surprise I found that no-one seemed to be aware of either model.  They are two excellent models that have been really helpful to me as I have developed as a trainer/teacher.  Put these with Transactional Analysis and I think you have all the information you need to make your work a success.

Heron talks about six styles that fit into two overall categories, Authoritative and Facilitative, and then three headings under each. Under the Authoritative heading are Prescriptive,  Informative, and Confronting , while Cathartic, Catalytic and Supportive go with Facilitative.         

These were explained to me by one of John Heron’s staff at Surrey University when I first started out teaching, and they have been a real help to me in understanding what is going on in my classroom, and more importantly which response from me is the most appropriate intervention.

In the next two or three weeks I will enlarge on 6CIA and the 6 facilitator styles as well as pointing you to the definitive web-site to find out all about it.  By the time I do my next blog my son will be a happily married man, good luck and lots of love to you both, James and Nicola.