First let me wish you a Happy, Successful and Prosperous New Year.
This week I was talking to Kathy, a friend in the village. Since I last saw her, she has taken up teacher training as a mature student. She’s really looking forward to teaching junior school children (8-10 year olds).
I asked her what the course was like. She sighed. She has had to do a long assignment. She didn’t mind the work; it was the writing up that was causing the problem. As an experienced scientist she is used to writing.
However, it seems that her tutor is not happy with her style. It is not ‘academic’ enough. I asked Kathy what her tutor meant by that and my friend said she didn’t know but suspected it might mean ‘use longer words’.
I asked her if she had asked the tutor to give her some more useful information. She had. She had even asked her tutor to give her an example of what she meant. The tutor told her that she couldn’t do this, because if she were to show Kathy a sample she would have to do the same for all her other students or Kathy would have ‘an unfair advantage’. So she’d have to show the example to all the other students.
I was shocked.
What did this tutor understand her responsibilities to be? Did she think she was there to make it as difficult as possible for Kathy to learn the skills she needs? And what was all that rubbish about an ‘unfair advantage’? My friend had no problem at all with all her peers seeing an example. What was causing Kathy the problem was that the other students had all recently graduated so were much more familiar with an ‘academic style’ than she was (she graduated more like 20 years ago).
(I also wondered what possible use this assignment was going to be in giving her the skills to teach children.)
Why Do People (Teachers) Do This?
I wonder if it’s because they think learning should be hard and people should struggle. Perhaps it’s because they themselves struggled, or perhaps they think people should work it out for themselves.
Or perhaps they see their job more as marking papers and catching people out rather than enabling their students to get the best possible grade.
Working It Out For Yourself
The thing about this is that it is a very nice idea, but not everyone can work everything out by themselves every time (more about how to do this next week). A moment’s thought easily illustrates the point.
Newton worked out his laws of motion himself, but it took him quite a while (many years). Einstein worked out his theory of special relativity himself, but that took him some time too and I think you’ll find both were quite clear that they couldn’t have done it without ’standing on the shoulders’ of others.
We don’t have time to work out all these key things ourselves. The job of a teacher is to give us the tools and information we need to do this. This includes drawing our attention to the relevant specifics.
Helping You To Work It Out
In preparation for my skiing holiday I bought Timothy Gallwey’s book, ‘Inner Skiing’. I have long admired his approach to learning and coaching. He tackles this topic with great skill. He explains that the coach needs to help the learner focus their attention in the right area (or shine the light on the right area as he puts it) so that the individual can learn.
This narrows down the field but does not rob you of the experience of working it out for yourself. What it does is make learning easier and more fun.
On a personal note, if you are a skier of any level of skill I would highly recommend this book. My friends noticed quite a leap in my skiing skills this year and it was purely as a result of reading this book. (When I say ‘leap’ I don’t mean to say I was making jumps or anything like that….). More on that next week.
The neuroscience I am familiar with (and you will have read about here on many occasions if you have been getting this for a while) backs up his approach completely.
By saying that the report must be more ‘academic’ the tutor has not narrowed the field enough for my friend. (Or for me – I don’t really know what she means.) She needs to give my friend a piece of text, it can be on any subject at all, but needs to be in the correct style (whatever she thinks it is) and then ask my friend a question that will focus her attention in the right direction.
It’s Not That Easy
Of course I’m making it sound easy, but helping others to learn is a great skill. It’s very much about asking the right question. This takes a lot of thought and practice.
But It Works
I once met Timothy Gallwey. I asked him for some advice with a client we’ll call Mike. He had a student working with him for a while. The student had a very poor level of meetings skills and was also very shy. Mike wanted to help him improve his skills, but was concerned about upsetting him.
Tim suggested that Mike ask the student to identify what he thought were effective and ineffective meetings behaviours over the following two weeks.
Two week’s later Mike gave me a ring. ‘You’ll never believe this,’ He said. ‘That student came to see me this morning and said ‘My meetings skills are really bad, can you help me?”
With not much help the student improved drastically.
As Tim explained to me, all the student needed was for his awareness in the right area to be raised. From the neuroscience we know that this means he was then getting the correct feedback in order to learn.
Poor Teaching
Just telling someone that their writing needs to be ‘more academic’ is sloppy and lazy, or it could just be a very poor level of skill. Whichever it is, it’s a very poor example to set to someone training to be a teacher.
What’s even worse is that, when asked the right question, this tutor did not give any useful information. In other words when asked what the difference was between my friend’s style and the ‘academic’ style, she did not give an answer.
It’s hard not to conclude that she doesn’t know the answer herself.
And that’s the beauty of the questioning style to assist learning. You don’t have to know the answer. Just the question. So all the tutor had to do was to provide an example and ask Kathy what she thought the difference was.
Have you ever been in the same situation as Kathy? Let me know. What did you do about it?
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You may be interested in our:
Teleseminar on Dealing With Poor Performance
12 January (or the recording if you can’t make the date)
This one hour session will include:
- What poor performance is
- How to Identify it quickly
- What to do about it
- If you are the manager – how to manage these situations
- If you are the individual – what to do to make sure you are fairly treated and you meet the required standards
You will also get a full set of notes and have access to the MP3 of the recording as soon as it is available, along with a full transcript of the session. You can just phone in.
It costs £25 (including VAT) and you can sign up using this link.
Once you have signed up we’ll send you all the details. If you come along and don’t find it useful, we’ll completely refund your money, just as we will with any product or service you are not happy with.
[...] Advantage Here are two great examples of the Inner Game in practice. The story comes from the Grapevine Blog. You can read the entire post there. Helping You To Work It Out In preparation for my skiing [...]