Education Delivery in a Changing World

After many years I went back to school, and I'm currently engaged in a Leadership and Management degree, which I am enjoying very much. Having said that, I must admit it has been quite a struggle to adapt to  a new style of teaching and delivery of knowledge, and for quite some time I felt frustrated with the way the curriculum was organized. I even thought this university was completely out of it, until I started discussing with people at other universities, and that the 'problem' was general!

It wasn't until I paused a bit and looked around at the world that I actually realized what the real 'problem' was... me! I am from a time when teachers would dump loads of theory on top of their students and expected them to memorize most of it. Lessons were lectures, and the student was almost always just a recipient, not a participant. Teachers were like a broadcasting station, and we were radios tuning in to their words.

Between finishing school and now I completed quite a lot of professional training, obtaining certifications and developing my professional skills, and most, especially more recently, have been much different from school used to be, and I realized and accepted that. After all, this was training, not school! Training was more often than not a participative, collaborative experience, where the 'instructor' was more a facilitator than a teacher. This obviously works very well, and I always left these training sessions feeling I had learned a lot of skills that I was ready to immediately put into action.

So, why not the same feeling about school, when the delivery method is so much like the training delivery method? Because I was conditioned by my school experience. I was expecting what I had always seen as education delivery in a school environment. But the reality is that the world is changing, and each one of us must adapt to the new reality. My wife was telling me today about a study where recent graduates displayed better results than experienced therapists, most probably because new graduates come out of university with a lot of practical projects completed, internships, and used to research on the richness of the Internet, while experienced therapists came out of school filled with theory and are still conditioned to see therapy as it was when they graduated. This is not true in every single case, of course, but it illustrates the point I am trying to make.

If we are part of training, educating, teaching, delivery of knowledge in any way, we ought to learn how to facilitate learning, engaging students in discussions and in collaborative projects, that will give them the tools they will need in real life situations. We must change from a 'lecturing mode' to a 'facilitating mode', be it at school, work, church or wherever we are educators. And, my friends, we are all educators to one degree or another.