Facilitation..part 1

what is facilitation? after coming back from timbaktu i am really asking myself this question. There was one session on shared fractions which i found really impressive. This teacher taught his children using shared fractions. It was not the content but the teacher's interest in his children which amazed me as he was able to find out the level of a child by observing how the child had done a certain thing. Coming back to facilitation the teacher came to a point where the children understood that they were dividing a number of objects equally to some number of children and the next step was to introduce them to the sign of division, so the teacher told them that he did not know and asked them to find out and come up with what sign needs to be put there.
The next day the children came up with the sign of division asking locals, then the question was where to place the sign between the numbers, on the left side of the numbers or on the right side of the numbers, in the end after the teacher asked them several questions came up with the sign being in the middle and the teacher was happy that the children got it..here i thought it was so cool the children coming up with stuff on their own but my bubble burst when someone asked me did the children come up with the sign of division on their own and i said they found out from others but he said no the sign already exists isn't it ..i said yes but the children took effort to find it ..the second thing he told me confused me ..he said there is a language where the division sign comes in the front of the numbers etc and these are conventions which are already there so what is the need to go all round it and also the fact that the teacher would have gone on till they came to the right answer(or so as to say what he wanted them to come to) so as far as the facilitation is concerned with regard to the division sign it is totally guided by the facilitator in the guise of making the child think which he thought was not necessary. My contention is though it is guided there is a possibility for the children to understand it much better as they went through the process of thinking and finding out for themselves. It is also making me think whether this type of facilitation actually helping children or are we somewhere disguising our objectives under the blanket of making them think till they get it right..hmm..