Guidance Guides (Guías de Orientación)
What this is. The artifact that accompanies the person who sustains other people’s learning process: the Learning Facilitator (Orientador de Aprendizaje). It exists at three altitudes — of the Learning Program, of the Learning Experience and of the Learning Unit (Programa, Experiencia, Unidad) — and it is the sibling document of the Learning Guide (Guía de Aprendizaje), which belongs to the person taking part. Both are written against the same skeleton and from the same declared structure, so that the platform can generate them as a pair.
What it adds and what it does not invent. Smoother already had all the material this guide needs — the eight-component Learning Object (Objeto de Aprendizaje), the eight Unit Structures, the six Task Types (Tipos de Tarea) and their routers, the activity catalog, the rubric anchored to the Learning Object, the memory principles, the AI patterns and antipatterns, the Experience Layer (Capa de Experiencia), the General Learning Definition (Definición General) — but it had nowhere to gather it for the person who is going to be in the room on Tuesday at nine. This document creates no instruments: it fixes the format, the sections, the origin of each section and the generation contract. Every instrument the guide carries keeps its own evidence label, without exception.
What it is for
So that the person orienting sees the process of the person who is learning whole and in order; knows where their own boundary is in each Learning Task; verifies the moments that cannot be improvised — the Hook and its discussion, the Structure’s gates, the Disruption (Perturbación) with its stopping rule, the first step of the Horizon (Horizonte), the opening retrieval; observes against the rubric and records a multi-component profile, never a grade; sustains the session when something fails — without the tool, with less time, with the group that actually showed up; and closes, recording what carries over to the next Learning Unit and what goes back to the person who designed it.
Learning-first, even when the subject is orienting. The guide is written from what the person taking part is going to do, not from what the person orienting is going to deliver. Every section is written in that direction: first the participant does X, then that is why the Learning Facilitator does Y and does not do Z. A guide written the other way round is badly generated, even if it contains the same data. It is the learning-first principle applied to its hardest case.
What it is NOT
It is not a script. It does not dictate the words of the person orienting, except where a line is load-bearing — the question of a Gate (Compuerta), the instruction of a Disruption, the stopping rule, the sentence that opens a retrieval: those go verbatim and marked as such; everything else is theirs. It is not a class plan that replaces judgement: the guide says what must happen and why, and when to deviate is decided by whoever sees the room; what is required is that the deviation be recorded, not that it not happen. It is not an evaluation of the person orienting: nothing that is recorded enters into a rating of their performance. It is not the learning material: it points at the contents, it does not reproduce them. And it is not the Learning Guide with more detail: they are two artifacts with two readers, and neither is a cut-down of the other.
The three altitudes
| Altitude | What it answers | When it is read |
|---|---|---|
| Of the Learning Program | Whom am I accompanying, toward what transformation, under what postures, and what am I being asked to sustain along the way? | Once, before starting, and at each Learning Block break. |
| Of the Learning Experience | What does this stretch build, in what order, with what budget of mechanics, and what fades along it? | Before the first Learning Unit, and at the close. |
| Of the Learning Unit | What happens in this session, who does what, what do I verify, what do I observe and what do I record? | Before, during and at the close of the session. It is the operational altitude. |
Inheritance by pointer, not by copy. No guide repeats what the one above already says: it points at it and declares only what belongs to its own altitude, because a duplicated declaration falls out of sync and nobody notices. Three consequences: nothing is restated downward; what the lower altitude must declare, it always declares — each Learning Unit has its own wonder, its own hook, its own moments to verify and its own table of Learning Tasks; and what exists only above is not invented below — a Unit does not create Disruptions, it receives the one the Experience spent on it, or none.
Each section declares its origin: generada (generated — derived mechanically from already declared structure, with the source named), autorada (authored — by the designer or by the Learning Facilitator, and the table says which) or invariante (invariant — fixed Smoother text, reproduced verbatim and never paraphrased). The Program guide has seventeen sections, the Experience one sixteen, the Unit one eighteen. The operational altitude has no purely invariant sections: all fixed text arrives embedded inside a generated section, deliberately — at that altitude, a section that only repeats doctrine is a section nobody opens halfway through a session.
Two sections set the tone of the document. In the Program one, “The responsibility belongs to the adults in the room”: the person taking part does not carry the choice of making an effort; the design of the work, of the assessment and of AI use is the responsibility of the person orienting and of the institution — with its corollary, Smoother does not mean “frictionless”. And “Your boundary: ask, never produce”: the person orienting may ask, explain a concept, criticize, point at a relevant idea, question an assumption, point to a source and say “I think you haven’t asked the right question yet”; they may not operate the device, write the text or the code, produce an asset, decide the concept or edit the submission. Over-assistance is detected the same way AI over-assistance is — the record of the process and the defense of one’s own work — not by surveillance.
Ten prohibitions
Prohibitions, not preferences: a generator that produces any of these things produced a defect. It never scripts except for the load-bearing lines · it never prescribes by preference · it never turns the rubric into a grade · it never scores the Experience Layer · it never restates content · it never uses the refused Spanish terms — «estudiante», «alumno», «curso», «módulo», «docente», «profesor», «facilitador», «tutor», «capacitador» — in Smoother’s voice or in anything a participant reads (the English rendering of the role remains Learning Facilitator; what is refused is the bare Spanish «facilitador») · it never claims a “proven method” · it never asks the person orienting to produce the work of the person who is learning · it never evaluates the person orienting · and it never inverts the learning-first direction.
The pairing rule
The Guidance Guide and the Learning Guide of the same Learning Unit are generated from the same declared structure and must agree; they are issued as a pair, and neither is published without the other. Agreeing means, verifiably: the same objectives, the same sequence of components with the same timings, the same Learning Tasks and the same activities, the same rubric rows — the person taking part self-assesses against exactly the rows the person orienting observes — and the same declared moment for each Gate. A discrepancy in any of those five elements is a generation defect, and it is resolved by correcting the declared structure, never by editing one of the two guides so that it squares with the other.
When a piece of data is missing, the generator does not invent and does not fill in: it flags the gap by naming the field and the altitude where it must be declared. A guide with markers is incomplete and usable; a guide with plausible filler is false. Two gaps block: a Disruption without a stopping rule, and a Horizon without a first step without permission.
Evidence
Level: Synthesized. It contributes no new instrument and no finding: it defines the format, the sections, the origin of each section and the generation contract of an artifact that gathers already existing instruments. The format is a design position; the instruments are not. That a guide should have these sections, in this order, with this separation between generated, authored and invariant, is a Smoother design decision: there is no research backing it and it is not presented as if there were. Proximity is a claim, and a design position surrounded by findings needs a marker of its own.
What is unresolved, said and not hidden. The effect is not measured: it is not known whether a generated guide changes what happens in the room compared with a Learning Facilitator prepared without it. The right density is unknown: eighteen Unit sections may be the adequate amount or twice the usable one, and that is corrected with observed use, not with opinion. And the boundary is not transmitted by reading: it is rehearsed, in role simulation, and that belongs to the preparation of the person orienting, not to this artifact.
Permitted wording: “an assembly of Smoother’s canon” · “a Smoother design position” · “aligns with” · “converges with” · “is consistent with”. Prohibited wording: “proven method” · “evidence-based” applied to the guide’s format · “the research shows that the Learning Facilitator’s guides improve learning” · any assertion of accreditation, endorsement or certification of anyone by anyone.
Related
Learning Guides · The Learning Object · Learning Units · Learning Tasks · Task Routing · Learning Activities · Evaluation · Memory and Learning · Artificial Intelligence in Learning · Experience Layer · Personal Preferences · Discovery · Elements of Materials · Challenges · Onboarding · Professional Frameworks
Source
protocol/smoother-guias-de-orientacion.md — state of 2026-09-17 (open section of the CHANGELOG, after 0.40.0).