Introductory Video Transcript for Getting Out of the Expert Trap! ccq4
Being a teacher means you’re the bottom line. You're the one that everyone turns to, students, parents, administrators and you're expected to have the ideas AND the answers. This sets you up! It can produce huge amounts of pressure, burnout, dissatisfaction and it’s producing increasingly large numbers of teachers leaving the profession. It also sets our students up. It can significantly get in the way of their learning in the most effectively manner especially given the direction education is headed.
Many of you may be familiar with the concept of:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime (Maimonides).
Well that quote has set us all up! What if instead it was, "set up the opportunity so that he can learn how to fish himself, experience the magic of discovery, and the joy of success. He will then have a way to feed himself for a lifetime AND the tools to learn and succeed more effectively in a multitude of ways forever."
Every time we tell someone how to do something we rob them. When people discover as part of a learning process they will be able to apply those learning components to other learning processes in their future. This includes their failures. In fact so-called failures can be even more important in terms of learning for a lifetime. There has been much research and new awareness into how we make creative linkages connecting memory nodes in multi-step processes where we apply past knowing and new data to emerging challenges and goals. People who have a history of discovering for themselves are often more resourceful, and able to apply and adapt coming up with answers to these emerging challenges and endeavours.
Isn't this what we want for our children?
The more we make the shift away from supplying and imposing our expertness, giving answers, and supplying solutions, and shifting to a more supportive environment where our students set up their own processes for learning, the more successful they will be.
Hey, don't kid yourself it may sound easy but it's not. Ok it may not even sound easy to some of us…I know I've certainly had my challenging moments!
Also, I don't know about you but for me it sure feels great at times to be looked up to as the expert, the center of attention. It can be hard to let that go.
Also, most of us teach because we care deeply that kids succeed and it's pretty darn scary standing by and watching, hearing and feeling kids starting to get it wrong, going down what we might think is the wrong road. You want to jump in and rescue them, making it less painful, because you do care. And, you're simply robbing them of a learning moment…
Kids will fight you as you make these shifts. They will say, "tell us the right way to do it, that's what you're here for". They will complain, they'll rebel, and slowly they will get more and more excited, feel accomplished, and engaged, and will want to have more responsibility for how they learn.
Think of that epidemic of boredom, apathy and disengagement that is infecting kids and teachers worldwide. You have a choice. You can choose to give out vitamins of a type that supports self-discovery, experimentation, student-teaching and collaboration or you can feed students a diet of sitting back and zoning out as you tell them again and again. It'll clog their learning arteries and shut them down more and more until they fade away, perhaps forever…
Many of you may be familiar with the concept of:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime (Maimonides).
Well that quote has set us all up! What if instead it was, "set up the opportunity so that he can learn how to fish himself, experience the magic of discovery, and the joy of success. He will then have a way to feed himself for a lifetime AND the tools to learn and succeed more effectively in a multitude of ways forever."
Every time we tell someone how to do something we rob them. When people discover as part of a learning process they will be able to apply those learning components to other learning processes in their future. This includes their failures. In fact so-called failures can be even more important in terms of learning for a lifetime. There has been much research and new awareness into how we make creative linkages connecting memory nodes in multi-step processes where we apply past knowing and new data to emerging challenges and goals. People who have a history of discovering for themselves are often more resourceful, and able to apply and adapt coming up with answers to these emerging challenges and endeavours.
Isn't this what we want for our children?
The more we make the shift away from supplying and imposing our expertness, giving answers, and supplying solutions, and shifting to a more supportive environment where our students set up their own processes for learning, the more successful they will be.
Hey, don't kid yourself it may sound easy but it's not. Ok it may not even sound easy to some of us…I know I've certainly had my challenging moments!
Also, I don't know about you but for me it sure feels great at times to be looked up to as the expert, the center of attention. It can be hard to let that go.
Also, most of us teach because we care deeply that kids succeed and it's pretty darn scary standing by and watching, hearing and feeling kids starting to get it wrong, going down what we might think is the wrong road. You want to jump in and rescue them, making it less painful, because you do care. And, you're simply robbing them of a learning moment…
Kids will fight you as you make these shifts. They will say, "tell us the right way to do it, that's what you're here for". They will complain, they'll rebel, and slowly they will get more and more excited, feel accomplished, and engaged, and will want to have more responsibility for how they learn.
Think of that epidemic of boredom, apathy and disengagement that is infecting kids and teachers worldwide. You have a choice. You can choose to give out vitamins of a type that supports self-discovery, experimentation, student-teaching and collaboration or you can feed students a diet of sitting back and zoning out as you tell them again and again. It'll clog their learning arteries and shut them down more and more until they fade away, perhaps forever…