The skill of  facilitating learning is required regularly through and through our lives. The requirement ranges from facilitating the learning of new recruits to facilitating learning during training programs to facilitating learning during focussed interactions to facilitating the learning of your child or spouse. More often than not , we are faced by frustrating questions such as
 a. " How do I ensure that the workshop participants will practice , What they are taught?
 b. "How do I ensure that they will remember  , what they have been taught 6 months or 1 year or 5  years from now ?"
 c.  "What should I do so that my son picks up driving faster ?"
 d.  " How do I facilitate the picking up of the right attitudes by my children ?"
  e.  "How do I make my spouse see what I can see ?"
 It can be an extremely frustrating experience when you can perceive the learning required by an individual but not knowing how to go about facilitating it.
 Let us examine the case of a 21/2 year old child who has been told by his parents to not to go on the road , since it is dangerous. When the child was playing outside by himself , he ventured on to the road one day. The mother came running , got angry with the child and spanked him.  The child was also not allowed to play on his own for some time , after the incident. Thereafter , the child desisted from venturing on to the road for sometime. Then  , he again ventured onto the road and the entire incident repeated itself.
 Thereafter ,  a child got a playmate younger than him. The child was told by his mother to not to allow his playmate to go on the road. Then , it was seen that the child not only desisted from going on to the road himself but also refrained his playmate from doing so.
 From , this case the following learning points regarding the facilitation of learning emerge :
  1. Involve the participant actively.
  2. Give freedom to experiment within controlled conditions.
  3. Give success or failure feedback immediately after the action is taken and do so  repeatedly.
  4. Give additional responsibility to the learner regarding the learning focus.

 This process of facilitating learning is potent everywhere , whether it is at home or in the office.
 From the learner's perspective , the sequence of learning actions are mapped below :

Each of these learning actions contribute towards strenghthening the learning. For the learning to be long term or for the development of skill , the learner would necessarily go through multiple cycles of this sequence of actions.
 Each of these learning actions,on the part of the learner, has to be triggered by the facilitator . This would reduce the incidence of low retention of learning inspite of the delivery of a lot of useful knowledge in training programmes.Let us examine the facilitation triggers in the case of teaching a person ," How to drive a car ?".

      FACILITATOR'S TRIGGERS  :
 

Learning Action 2: Feedback Receipt  : The facilitator specifies the  right and wrong actions and the resultant success or failure .

Learning Action 3. Analysis  :
  Trigger 3 : What did you do , that resulted in the car accelerating , when you were  supposed to slow down ?
  Trigger 4 : "What if ---" Questions?
                                Ex.: What if a cow strays to the middle of the road?
Learning Action 4. Synthesis  :
  Trigger 5 : What is the right sequence of actions , when you want to slow down ?

    Trigger 6 : How would you rate your driving skill and what would you have to do to improve the rating ?

 Using these triggers in conjunction with the process of facilitating learning catalyses faster skill development.
 The utilization of  such facilitation triggers is multifaced , in an organizational context.:

      APPLICATIONS  :  Some applications are :
 On - the - job training of Distributor salesmen  :
  The current standard operating procedure of a company X, specifies that the Territory Sales In charge (TSI) should demonstrate the right process and skills of selling to the distributor salesman. Thereafter , he should let the distributor salesman make some indpendent sales calls & then give  feedback regarding performance.

 The facilitation triggers focussed on enabling the salesman to analyse , synthesize and evaluate his own successes and failures are missing. This significantly reduces the speed of  learning & the development of selling skills.

 APPLICATION EXAMPLE  : Class - Room Training
  Most of the trainers utilize a lot of  personal examples during their sessions. Though these arouse a lot of interest , the level of participant's learning & retention is a question mark. More often than not , the learning remains surfacial.
 The utilization of facilitation triggers for learning enables the mental processing of examples quoted . This results in learning which is deeper and more long - term.
 In both the above mentioned application examples , there is a lot of focus on facilitation triggers for analysis , synthesis and evaluation . However , no amount of analysis and  synthesis by the learner is going to make up for gaps in perception. Therefore , the facilitator's inventory of skills needs to contain triggers or actions for expanding the perception of the learner , if  so required.
 A company which took the initiative of  calling the families of its employees for visits to the plant , later found greater alignment in the employees family.
 Recounting my work with a leading FMCG Co. , I was doing research of the performance of the sales trainers , many of whom , were significantly elder to me both in terms of experience and age. One of the trainees casually remarked to me , " I  thought what would Sanjiv Narang evaluate"
 Now this statement was based on a strong belief that he has 28 years of experience in the field. Then , how can Sanjiv Narang who has barely been around for 8 years  evaluate me ? When I presented data through live examples taken from a session which the sales trainer had taken , their was new light in the sales trainer's eyes. This signified a change in perception which had a visible impact on his facilitation prowess in subsequent sessions.
 This became possible due to the collection and utilization of  live data. Otherwise the resistance to learning would have been enormous.There is no substitute to live data for expanding the perception of the learners. This requires a conscious effort on the part of the
" Facilitator of learning".
 The "Facilitation of learning", is a skill which is continuously demanded from us in all walks of life and with all kinds of  people. A conscious development of this skill empowers us and reduces frustrating questions such as "How do I make my departmental personnel  more sensitive to the changing  environment ?".