What Is Facilitation and Why Use It ?

Facilitation, as the term is used in this book, refers to processes by which one member of a group operates to help the group analyze issues, learn from experience, and work as a team to draw conclusions. In aviation settings, the facilitator is typically an instructor, however facilitation requires the instructor to work in ways quite different from those of traditional instruction. The traditional roles of the aviation instructor have been to convey information, typically to trainees who are less knowledgeable than the instructor, and to evaluate trainee performance. Facilitation, in contrast, focuses on assisting trainees to learn and evaluate through their own inquiry. Facilitation is especially appropriate when trainees already possess substantial expertise. Facilitation in aviation training began with the early developers of Crew Resource Management (CRM) and Line Oriented Flight Training (LOFT), who recommended that instructors facilitate crew debriefings of LOFT rather than lecture the crew on what they did right or wrong. Over the past twenty years this concept has become widely accepted: unfortunately, until recently detailed materials and methods specific to aviation have not been available to train instructors in the demanding skills of facilitation. Several individuals and organizations have experimented with using facilitation in other aspects of aviation training and operations, however until now little of this work has been published in a widely available form. We intend this book to show the innovative ways facilitation is being used in aviation and to provide a detailed account of methods of facilitation that will enable aviation professionals to apply these methods in their work. In this chapter, we outline the basic concepts of facilitation and trace its origins from the fields of education and humanistic psychology. We compare the advantages and disadvantages of facilitation with traditional methods of instruction and discuss the circumstances in which each is best used, and we recommend an approach to training facilitators.