Well, listen to and consider this June 11, 2021 quote from former candidate and now New York City Mayor Eric Adams:
“With new technology of remote learning, you don’t need school children to be in a school building with a number of teachers. It’s just the opposite. You could have one great teacher that’s in one of our specialized high schools teach 300-400 students…”
When the Mayor of New York City has this take on how people learn, perhaps it’s not so surprising that we’re still sitting through endless broadcast-style sessions at meetings and conferences.
Until we elect leadership that has a basic understanding of how great teachers actually teach, and how their students can effectively learn, we’re going to continue to live in a world of meetings full of ineffective lectures.
Practice what you teach. When I’m presenting and sharing my conviction that experiential learning is far superior to broadcast learning, it would be pretty hypocritical for me to lecture. It would also be pretty ineffective. As Stephen Jenkinson says:
“…when expressed properly, teachings don’t function as symbols or metaphors…they are an incarnation of what they are advocating.” —Stephen Jenkinson, On How We Deny Our Mortality, The Sun Magazine
In the meantime, if you come to one of my workshops or presentations you won’t find me talking to you uninterrupted for more than five to ten minutes max. That’s how I practice what I teach.
In his beautiful and insightful book “Being Mortal“, surgeon Atul Gawande describes a mistake clinicians frequently make. They “see their task as just supplying cognitive information—hard, cold facts and descriptions. They want to be Dr. Informative.”
Atul contrasts this with an approach offered by palliative care physician Bob Arnold:
“Arnold … recommended a strategy palliative care physicians use when they have to talk about bad news with people—they ‘ask, tell, ask.’ They ask what you want to hear, then they tell you, and then they ask what you understood.”
—Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, pages 206-7
“Ask, tell, ask” is excellent advice for anyone who wants to connect fruitfully in a learning environment. Personally, over the years, I’ve become better at asking people what they want to learn (ask) before responding (tell), but I still often omit the second ask: “What did you understand?”
The follow-up ask is important for two reasons.
Without it, we do not know if anything we told has been heard/absorbed, and whether the listener’s understanding is complete and/or accurate.
Asking the listener’s understanding of what he heard allows him to process his understanding immediately. This not only improves the likelihood that it will be retained and remembered longer but also allows him to respond to what he has heard and deepen the conversation.
“Ask, tell, ask” assists in transforming a putative one-way information dump from a teacher to a student into a learning conversation. I will work to better incorporate the second ask into my consulting interactions. Perhaps you will too?
I learned to code at school when I was 15. No big deal? It was 1966. Learning to program a computer changed my life. Far more important than nearly everything else—facts I have long since forgotten—that I was “taught”.
Learning to code didn’t change my life because I could then make big bucks writing software, though my fourth career, as an IT consultant, was very kind to me. And the important truth of the video’s opening quote by Steve Jobs, “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer…because it teaches you how to think,” isn’t the main reason my life was changed.
No. The most important lesson from learning to code was that I could be creative. I discovered I had the potential to do things that no one else had done before. Programming showed me that I could make my own stuff, the way I wanted to make it.
I learned this despite the fact that this was at a time when my program was punched onto teletype paper tape, brought on public transport to a London university computer five miles away, and run through an Elliott 803, one of the world’s first semiconductor-based computers. I got to run one program a week. If it had errors, I had to wait another week before fixing it and trying again.
No one knew how to “teach programming” to fifteen-year-old kids then. Our teachers just handed us an Algol manual and asked us to figure out what we could do with it. (The IF statement was a revelation.)
I still remember my first two programs. The first found all the prime numbers less than a thousand. A nerdy task that took several weeks to get right.
My second?
I wrote, with a friend, a program that could play chess.
I never finished that second program, of course.
Only being able to run it once a week, we didn’t get much further than code that knew the rules of chess and was able to make legal moves. But what a leap for a fifteen-year-old British schoolboy—to have the freedom to choose an ambitious project that has occupied human minds for over half a century, culminating in the computer Deep Blue’s defeat of World Chess Champion Kasparov in 1997.
Today, it’s simple for children to work with inexpensive computers that can do far more, far easier, than the computers of my youth. The ability to create movies, graphics, sound, writing, and games is now at our fingertips. We know how to introduce children to the potential of these incredible machines far better than my teachers did.
The immediate feedback, wonder, opportunity for self-expression, power to create—and, yes, learning how to think—are all available in the potential of this amazing device. What most schools don’t teach? Make algebra, geometry, and calculus optional; teach programming to all children instead!
Ask, tell, ask.
No one knew how to “teach programming” to fifteen-year-old kids then. Our teachers just handed us an