5LD03 Facilitate Personalised and Performance-Focused Learning focuses on how to deliver learning activities that make a real difference. It explains how to plan a strong learning session, use pre-learning tasks, and tailor learning to suit different people so it can be applied back at work. It also covers facilitation skills for both in-person and online learning, as well as the key principles and ethical standards needed to deliver an excellent learning experience.
TASK 1: Facilitating Learning – Written Questions
AC 1.1 Discuss three factors you might consider when preparing to facilitate group-based learning and development activities.
Factor 1: Learner Analysis and Group Composition
Understanding who the learners are is the essential foundation for effective facilitation preparation. This encompasses their existing knowledge and skill levels, prior learning experiences, preferred learning styles, job roles and contexts in which they will apply the learning, any specific needs including disabilities, language requirements, or neurodivergent preferences, and the group dynamics including whether participants know each other, their hierarchical relationships, and any interpersonal tensions that might affect group functioning. Honey and Mumford’s learning styles model (cited in Lancaster, 2023) reminds facilitators that any group will contain activists, reflectors, theorists, and pragmatists, and that activities should accommodate this diversity rather than favouring a single preference. Without thorough learner analysis, the facilitator risks designing activities that are pitched too high or too low, fail to address the actual learning need, or inadvertently exclude participants.
Factor 2: Clear Learning Objectives and Alignment
Every facilitated session requires clearly defined learning objectives that specify what participants will be able to know, do, or demonstrate by the end of the activity. Objectives should be specific, measurable, and directly connected to the identified learning need and the participants’ workplace context. Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, cited in Lancaster, 2023) provides a framework for ensuring objectives are pitched at the appropriate cognitive level: knowledge-level objectives require different facilitation approaches from application or evaluation-level objectives. Preparation includes mapping each activity and resource to specific objectives, ensuring that every element of the session contributes to the intended learning outcomes and that the session plan has a coherent logical flow from opening through development to consolidation and action planning (CIPD, 2024).