• Introduction
• Teacher as Information Conveyor
• Teacher as Facilitator
• Blaming the Administrators
• Shifting Markets
• The New University
• The Professional Teacher
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Peter J. Denning (pdenning@gmu.edu)  The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Section Two:
Teacher as Facilitator: Next Target for Automation

Some educators have proposed that the facilitator model is more suited to future teaching than the lecturer model. Let us examine this claim. The good news is that this view opens up the human side of learning because the teacher must deal with the diversity of concerns, learning styles, backgrounds, and talents among students. The bad news has two chapters: it does not address the automation issue and it is blocked by enormous institutional inertia.

First, automation is likely to make significant inroads into the guide and coach aspects of teaching. Researchers in artificial intelligence, education technology, and management are making considerable progress with technology and processes capable of automating significant parts of the coaching function. AI researchers are studying natural language and immersion tutorial systems, virtual reality simulators, multistrategy learning systems, personal coaching agents, and neural nets for assessing competence by observing problem-solving strategies. Ed tech researchers are studying collaboration systems, individual history-of-action recorders, simulations, workbenches, tools for supporting student participation and collaboration, and new forms of computer-aided assessment. Managers are studying how to teach people to be good coaches, capturing on CDROM and videotape training processes that actually work.

Thus it is likely that there will come a time when students can receive meaningful inspiration or advice from recorded clips of great coaches at the exact moments when they encounter breakdowns in their learning. The successful tutorial systems constructed by Roger Schank are like this. Virtual-reality environments can host a coach’s routines for training team members. A large semantic-network database can host a large number of possible paths that students might follow through a domain, including the many paths that lead to dead ends. Assessment systems already exist to administer non-repeating multiple-choice exams, grade programs, grade essays, and assess a student’s level of competence at problem-solving in a domain; these systems are getting progressively more powerful and capable of making increasingly sophisticated and accurate assessments of human competence. (Education expert Howard Gardner argues that new kinds of tests for skillful behavior in domains may be accorded status as indicators of intelligence.) It is only a matter of time until these technologies mature and become capable of automating important parts of what we now call coaching, facilitating, and guiding.

The second reason that the facilitator role of a teacher may be an unrealizable dream is institutional inertia. Many of the skills associated with good coaching don’t show up on the radar screens of our information discourse. They are not among the skills demanded or expected of most faculty. They are not taught to PhD students aspiring to university positions because few of the faculty know how to teach them and because the students are not required to study with faculty who understand coaching (e.g., management or athletics). Moreover, many faculty see the type of environment in which coaching works best as a "training" environment and maintain that training is not the main function of the university. Assessment of teachers in their capacities as coaches must necessarily focus on the performance of students -- much as athletic coaches or managers are assessed by the performance of their teams -- a form of assessment that does not resonate with the standard practice of peer review. Teachers who embrace the role of coach often feel lonely and isolated in their institutions for these reasons. Such teachers are attracted to the growing number of private educational vendors and corporate universities that value the skill of coaching.

Even without these impediments, great coaching is not the primary quality students look for in great teachers. There must be more to the role of the teacher than is captured by either the information manager or the coach.

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