I go into a different school every day and this is what I see !!
1. Teachers that are working harder than the students – how mad is that? Under the present system, the teachers want the results more than the students themselves!!
2. I also see students that are not intrinsically motivated, and….teachers that are forever ’spoon-feeding’ the students to get better results.
3. You’ll find kids that don’t do anything for themselves….they don’t even learn for themselves. Many of them don’t even bring in a pen or a pencil.
BUT, the best learning is when you find out stuff, not when you just get ‘told’ it !!
I find it utterly alarming, and much of it has to do with the teaching style (I’m not trying to be rude to teachers) and the attitude towards ‘failure’ in this country, where young people are not allowed to fail or make mistakes and find out for themselves.
This country and many others are paralysed by fear; afraid of ‘this’ or afraid of what they’ll think and even afraid of success!! (because, you can ONLY go downhill after!!! – that is how fearful people think).
• The time when YOU learnt MOST in your life was not when everything went right!!! This is not a fact but it is the truth. It was when everything went wrong. That is REAL learning.
• The time when you learnt most was not when someone told you something: it was when you asked, because you wanted to find out.
• The time when you learnt most was when you were made to think, i.e. the teachers asked you a question – and you answered it.
• The time when you learnt most was when you most readily engaged with the teacher and not necessarily the subject. They struck a balance between caring for you and stretching your mind. Why was I brilliant at French with one teacher and useless with another? Mmmm…
• The time when you achieved most in your life was when you wanted to, NOT when ‘someone else wanted you to’. Let’s face it; mature students return to school and never muck about. They aren’t cleverer; they just want it more!!!
You notice that I am not going to tell you THE SOLUTION to our education problem – that would be too easy; I just want to ask the question!!!
Part of THE SOLUTION is in my 2 hour workshop for teachers called “How to get students to learn in the quickest, easiest way”…
I could never be a teacher but I am a motivational speaker. My job is to enagage students and get them to learn some ‘life changing’ stuff – all in just 2 hours. I’ve now just applied all of that logic to helping teachers in the classroom.
I have neither the patience nor the knowledge to be a teacher; it’s a specialist thing. Teachers are amazing people, but they way they deliver their ‘learning’ is formulaic and lacking the most important quality – it doesn’t get students to ‘think’!!! It doesn’t get them to find out, make mistakes nor question. Teachers aren’t always confident at getting ‘buy-in’ from the students and engaging their minds. The way I do it shows you how to.
Giles Ennis (a cool science teacher) from Monks Dyke in Louth said….
“I don’t want students to answer my questions – I want them to question my answers“.
This is genius, because what Giles is saying means that the pupils have to ‘think’ about it. Thinking and learning go hand in hand.
It’s this philosophy that means we’ve been 90% SOLD OUT for the last 3 months and 100% SOLD OUT for the next 6 weeks!!!
