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Education is not a unilateral process. There are many intersections where the learning experience is influenced, and educational support professionals are there to help with the navigation.
A day in education is not just about receiving information and doing the tasks assigned; instead, practice, feedback, continuity, accompaniment, social interaction, teamwork, and effective communication, and other things are necessary elements.
Teachers are expected to manage all of these skills. Also, it is expected for them to be in charge of an entire class. This is not easy, so the reinforcements for these abilities and the individual attention that a student receives depend on having educative support staff, the backbone that supports effective learning. Below are examples of different educational support roles and functions.
Education support staff roles
The Facilitator: A bridge between education and learning
A facilitator is a professional who converges the principles of education, psychology, pedagogy, and andragogy. The facilitator’s job is not to teach as a professor or teacher would, but to facilitate learning a particular theory, discipline, or practice in a class, workshop, meeting, or activity.
In his or her task of facilitating the class objectives’ achievement, the facilitators use their knowledge of experiential learning, group processes, and effective communication. Skills such as decision-making, workshop design, and crisis intervention are also crucial for the facilitator to be able to satisfy any need of the class on its way to achieving a common goal.
Beyond the classroom, a facilitator’s ecosystem includes worktables, workshops, projects, and any activity that requires collaborative work and learning, whether it is academic or work-related, or for personal development.
The Tutor: An indispensable reinforcement
Tutors are students’ primary allies in strengthening the knowledge and mastery of various areas of learning. Schools and universities usually rely on tutors to provide extra help to students who need additional review or practice in some subjects or disciplines.
Tutors are experts in the subjects that they reinforce with the students. They also know pedagogy and different learning methods, so they can provide more personalized attention, working with a single student or small groups.
Also, tutors have to know the academic history of the students they are advising and pedagogical or cognitive problems that could hinder the student’s learning in question. They work with the students on their personal development and maturity, and they encourage them to participate in the sessions.
The Counselor: A companion throughout the school days
The principal purpose of a school is to educate the students who attend it. However, to achieve this, it is necessary to pay attention to the elements and experiences that influence or impact the educational experience.
The personal experiences of the students are essential when measuring their willingness and ability to learn. If a student suffers from bullying, if there are problems at home, if they have anxiety, they fail to connect with a group of friends, if they are going through an identity crisis. These are all issues that require personalized attention from someone with a high capacity for listening, analyzing, empathizing, understanding and communicating effectively. This person is the counselor.
The counselor’s job is to provide a safe space for conversation, generate solutions, and give the accompaniment that the student needs to improve their experience in life and their swiftness in learning. A counselor is a person who helps determine whether a student needs a space to talk, have a meeting (or meetings) with their parents present, or should obtain the help of a psychologist.
Counselors also tend to offer educational sessions for personal development, values, ethics, management of emotions, and how to make friends, among other topics relevant to the students’ emotional and psychological maturation.
The Vocational Counselor: A guide to help plan the future
At the end of primary education, students should have a set of dominant interests and skills that allow them to get an idea of what vocational training they want or in which field of work they would fare best.
Vocational counselors accompany students through the psychological and pedagogical processes where they discover their strongest areas of interest and the disciplines they excel in. This knowledge makes the students’ choices clearer and helps them plan for their continuing education and job development.
Have you received the help of any of these support professionals in your academic career? What has been your experience? Are you one of them? Tell us in the comments section.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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