The Teacher Can Only Be a Help or An Impediment To Learning

In 1969, Peter Drucker published the leadership classic, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. In a discussion on the crisis in education, he argues that we don’t need more money, we need better methodology. We need creativity to improve productivity in the classroom.

Few teachers spend in their entire teaching careers as much time or thought on preparing their classes as in invested in the many months of writing, drawing, acting, filming, and editing one thirty-second commercial. [The commercial] is indeed the prototype of the ideal “program” with its three key elements: effective sequence of the material, validation through repetition, and self-motivation of the learner through pleasure. A level of teaching that was acceptable to older generations, who had no standards of comparison, dissatisfies the children of the television age, bores them, offends them.

Psychologists have proved that children vary but little in their learning abilities. Information, however, will only be learned if it is presented as a “program.” This means, first, that the material has to be in a sequence in which one piece of information leads to the next piece to be learned. It means, second, that the arrangement must show clear purpose—the sequence must make sense to the student. It means, third, that what has been learned earlier has to be repeated again and again, and applied again and again; it has to be reaffirmed or else it is forgotten.

The motivation, the incentive, the reward for the acquisition of information must be built into the program itself. External rewards are not motivators. At every step the learner must receive satisfaction from the act of learning and from doing it right.

Learning can only be done by the learner. It cannot be done by the “teacher.” The teacher can only be a help or an impediment to learning. The pupil who needs external pushing and supervision for learning will not learn. All the information, all the affirmation, and all the motivation should lie in the process of learning itself.

Teaching has a lot more to do with perception than it has to do, apparently, with intellect.

How well do your presentations, your training, meet these criteria? If we are boring people, they will stop learning.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:10 AM
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Teaching and Learning Are Not the Same Thing

I don’t how often you have asked a teacher why they got into teaching, but all too often I hear, “Because I love kids.” Well, that’s a good reason to get into daycare, but hardly a good reason to get into teaching. It hardly surprising that our school boards think throwing money at the education problem will solve it. Teaching is a skill distinct from liking people or intellectual ability—although it’s good to possess both to be an effective teacher. Sadly, while teachers should be teaching (and many wish they were), too many find themselves babysitting. Make no mistake, this happens in the workplace too.

Over 160 years ago, Horace Mann, American educator and founder of the first school for teacher education in the United States (1839), wrote, “The ability to acquire and the ability to impart are wholly different talents. The former may exist in the most liberal manner without the latter.”

The ability to acquire is the power of understanding the subject manner of investigation. Aptness to teach involves the power of perceiving how far a scholar understands the subject matter to be learned, and what in the natural order, is the next step he is to take. It involves the power of discovering and of solving at the time the exact difficulty by which the learner is embarrassed. The removal of a slight impediment, the drawing aside of the thinnest veil which happens to divert his vision is worth more to him than volumes of lore on collateral subjects.

How much does the pupil comprehend of the subject? What should his next step be? Is his mind looking toward a truth or an error? The answer to these questions must be intuitive in the person who is apt to teach.

Aptness to teach includes the presentation of the different parts of a subject in a natural order. If a child is told that the globe is about 25,000 miles in circumference before he has any conception of the length of a mile, the statement is not only utterly useless as an act of instruction but it will probably prevent him ever afterward from gaining and adequate idea of the subject. The novelty will be gone, and yet the fact unknown. Besides, a systematic acquisition of a subject knits all parts of it together, so that they will be longer retained and more easily recalled. To acquire a few of the facts gives us fragments only; and even to master all the facts, but to obtain them promiscuously, leaves what is acquired so unconnected and loose that any part of it may be jostled out of place and lost, or remain only to mislead.

He who is apt to teach is acquainted, not only with common methods for common minds but with peculiar methods for pupils of peculiar dispositions and temperaments; and he is acquainted with the principles of all methods where by he can vary his plan according to any difference of circumstances.

In the workplace, as well, we would be wise to remember that teaching is an art that must be adapted to the students learning patterns and by those with an aptitude to teach. In both our schools and workplaces, we need to enable students to learn and teachers to teach. Next we will take a look at the thoughts that one of the most insightful thinkers of our time wrote on teaching, 128 years after Horace Mann.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:12 AM
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Any College Will Do

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Carol Hymowitz wrote an encouraging article entitled, Any College Will Do. She begins, "The college diplomas of the nation's top executives tell an intriguing story: Getting to the corner office has more to do with leadership talent and a drive for success than it does with having an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university.” Here are some highlights:

Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges. "I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business," says Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

What counts most, CEOs say, is a person's capacity to seize opportunities. As students, they recall immersing themselves in their interests, becoming campus leaders and forging strong relationships with teachers. And at state and lesser-known schools, where many were the first in their families to attend college, they sought challenges and mixed with students from diverse backgrounds—an experience that helped them later in their corporate climbs.

Inspired by an economics professor who made the subject "fun and relevant," Bill Green, CEO of Accenture, went on to Babson College to earn his bachelor's and M.B.A. degrees. But he credits Dean with teaching him to think analytically, to gain confidence in his abilities and to learn to work with people.

A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's CEO, chose Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., because he wanted a solid liberal-arts education and to be assured a spot on the intercollegiate basketball team. A history major who graduated in 1969, he was elected president of his sophomore class, became a fraternity officer and spent his junior year studying in France. I learned to think, to communicate, to lead, to get things done," he says, adding that those qualities are what he seeks in job candidates at his company. "Any college will do."

With that in mind, perhaps one should consider a liberal arts education and forgo the pre-professional education. Learning to work with people is what leadership is all about. It could be argued that a liberal arts education better prepares you to do just this. Exposure to a diverse body of knowledge allows a person to connect in more and different ways with more people—a skill that will serve leaders well. A more varied study gives one more context with which to view the world. This in turn can develop a mind better suited to grasp new concepts, form deeper understanding, produce new ideas and make more creative connections. A liberal arts undergraduate degree at your local college or university may be just what you need to prepare you for what Dan Pink describes as a new world in which "right brain" qualities—inventiveness, empathy, meaning—predominate.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:20 AM
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Growing Concerns: Preparing Children for the Future

This year at the National Education Summit on High Schools, Bill Gates remarked, “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. [W]e have to understand that today’s high schools are not the cause of the problem; they are the result.”

In our conversations with a local school district, we suggested that the problems in the district are by and large brought on by the system itself. Unfortunately, they can’t get over the notion that the district's problems are the lack of money. True, due to the lack of money the Band-Aids are failing, but they are only a symptom. Unless the school board can drop this mindset, they will continue to face the same problems but with increasing intensity as time goes on. Obsolete paradigms keep otherwise bright people dumb, because they can’t learn to what needs to be done and develop a new approach. They have the answers but unfortunately they can't see them.

This month the Stanford Magazine tackles some of the age-old concerns over children. They will be tomorrow's work force. Are we properly preparing them? In one article they invited half a dozen Stanford faculty members to analyze and help us understand what childhood is like today, and what we should be doing to make it better. Here are some excerpts from that article:

Michael Wald: I actually think childhood is getting longer. As more and more children go on to higher education, they are more dependent upon their families for longer periods of time. They live with their families well into their 20s. And most outcomes that we measure to gauge children’s well-being have improved in recent years.

William Damon: They’re creating their own families as much as a decade later than historical norms. And work commitments are being postponed beyond what any economy has ever tolerated in history. It creates a kind of moratorium where people can discover themselves and play out a lot of different possibilities, but the downside is that it creates uncertainty about what you’re going to end up doing in life. If you go back even a generation or two in our own society, when more kids were living on farms or helping their parents run delicatessens or whatever, they were taking responsibility early. I mean there were 14-year-old kids driving tractors all over this country and helping bring home the bacon. We’re not giving kids those kinds of responsibilities, even in disadvantaged families. Sometimes kids go out and get jobs at McDonald’s, but that’s different. They’re not running a little family business or preparing for a vocation, becoming a fisherman like Dad. A lot of kids are drifting, and are not so happy about it.

William Damon: What worries me is not the mass media; it’s the vanishing number of positive opportunities for constructive engagement that traditionally kids have had in our society. Everything from local playgrounds where parents used to let their kids go out and play stick ball to apprenticeships where kids would tag along with the neighborhood cop or show up at the newspaper and learn about reporting. If you get a kid involved in something positive, whether it’s sports or academics or art, that kid is not going to get in trouble.

Fernando Mendoza: In my clinical experience, when you have parents engaged with kids, the kids can deal with a lot of negative influences. When parents, for whatever reason, don’t have the time or take the time to engage their kids, the chances are greater that media and other influences can sway kids.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:13 AM
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