Facilitating or Teaching: What Best Supports Experiential Learning?

Experiential learning—learning by doing—is central to competency‑based education because it bridges theory and practice. The question for instructors is not whether experiential learning matters, but how best to support learners on that journey. Should instructors be teaching, facilitating, or something else entirely?

Teaching vs. Facilitating: What’s the Difference?

To answer that question, it helps to clarify the distinction between teaching and facilitating.

Teaching focuses on the delivery of knowledge from an expert to a learner. It is most often associated with lectures or demonstrations, where the instructor’s role is to explain concepts, model skills, and ensure learners understand foundational theory.

Facilitating, by contrast, focuses on guiding learners through the learning process itself. A facilitator does not need to be the subject‑matter expert, but must be skilled in supporting learners as they make sense of new information, apply it in practice, and reflect on their experience.

How Competency-Based Learning Actually Works

To develop competence, learners need several key elements:

• An understanding of the competency, including the underlying skills and knowledge required for mastery
• A clear picture of what mastery looks like in practice
• Opportunities to practice—repeatedly

Practice is essential. It creates space for feedback, reflection, and growth. Competency‑based learning therefore requires instructors to provide foundational knowledge, define performance expectations clearly, and design multiple opportunities for meaningful practice.

Teaching or Facilitating? The Answer Is Both

The answer, of course, is both.

At the early stages of experiential learning, the instructor’s role is primarily that of a teacher. Learners need expert guidance to understand the competency they are developing. Instructors introduce relevant theory and skills and demonstrate how those skills are applied in real‑world contexts.

As learners move into the practice phase, the instructor’s role shifts toward facilitation. Here, the focus is on structure and guidance rather than instruction. Instructors support learners as they apply what they have learned, encouraging reflection through debriefs and purposeful questioning. These conversations often generate the “aha” moments that help learners connect experience with understanding.

Feedback: Where Teaching and Facilitating Intersect

Feedback often requires instructors to move fluidly between teaching and facilitating. Corrective feedback—addressing errors, omissions, or misunderstandings—and formal evaluation align more closely with the teaching role. Feedback aimed at improvement, reflection, and self‑assessment, however, is more consistent with facilitation.

It’s Not How—It’s When

The real question is not which approach best supports experiential learning, but when each approach should be used.

Effective instructors remain flexible and responsive to learner needs. A session planned as a facilitated exercise may reveal gaps in understanding that require direct instruction. Conversely, a lecture may naturally evolve into a facilitated discussion that connects new concepts to learners’ prior experience.

Experiential learning is best supported when instructors know when to teach, when to facilitate, and how to move intentionally between the two.