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Teaching

Rules for Teaching

1. Almost everyone enjoys learning; few people enjoy being taught.
2. Adults learn best when they are actively involved in the process.
3. Trust and support promote learning; suspicion and criticism create defensiveness.
4. The best teachers see things from the student's point of view.
5. Effective teachers are more than sources of information; they are role models for their students.

(Eric Skopec & Lance Kiely, Taking Charge)

To teach is to learn twice. (Joseph Joubert, 1754-1824)

To understand teaching, perhaps we ourselves must reexperience being students of the foreign. (C. Roland Christensen)

Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is often a better starting-point than good behavior would be. (William James, Talks to Teachers)

Psychology is a science--teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by use of its originality. (William James)

The Teacher learns far more than the student. (Zig Ziglar)

My own definition of a great instructor is someone who works in that margin of inspiration between one's own needs and the firing of someone else's creativity. That person for me was the architect Louis Kahn. I can't conceive of anyone being a better teacher. He was an extraordinary teacher. What made him an extraordinary person for people was that he taught 24 hours a day. And what he tried to do was to teach himself, and he did that so well that everyone around him learned. He allowed us to be more of ourselves. (Richard Saul Wurman, Follow the Yellow Brick Road)

Perhaps the real common denominator is the underlying ability behind these characteristics--an ability that seemed to be at the heart of most of the model instructors. They were people who could teach us something that could be applied and expanded to other subjects and endeavors, people who gave us knowledge and information in such a way that we were empowered to act on our own. (Richard Saul Wurman, Follow the Yellow Brick Road)

Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. (Richard Bach, Illusions: Reflections of a Reluctant Messiah.)

If I had known by son was going to be president of Bolivia, I would have taught him to read and write. (Enrique Penaranda's Mother)

Meanwhile, there are still good teachers and bad teachers. Visits to hundreds of schools have convinced me that the teacher who can make the present system work is undoubtedly a master. He or she is not necessarily the one who gives the most polished lectures, but rather the one who has discovered how to involve each student actively in the process of learning. (George Leonard, Mastery)

Those who can do, those who care teach.

We now know how people learn. We now know that learning and teaching are not two sides of the same coin. They are different. What can be taught has to be taught and will not be learned otherwise. But what can be learned must be learned. (Peter Drucker, The New Realities)

Most Important Ingredient to Speaking Success (by Lilly Walters)

I get almost a hundred phone calls and inquiries a month, sometimes more. These are callers who would like to be professional presenters and want us to start booking them. I always say, "Well, what's your topic?" That too often stops the cold. Sometimes they come back at me with, "I can present on anything! You give me a topic and I can get an audience to buy off on anything. I can get them to follow me around like sheep! Like Mary with those little lambs."

I don't think so. I've never met a successful presenter who can make that work for very long.

You know the nursery rhyme,

 

"Mary had a little lamb,

 

Its fleece was white as snow,

 

And everywhere that Mary went,

 

The lamb was sure to go."

 

Bruce Barton of Batton, Barton, Durstine & Osborne (the largest advertising agency in the U.S. in the '40's) used to say in his sales seminar that sales people should pay heed to one of the other verses...

"Why doth the lamb love Mary so,"

 

The eager children cried?

 

"Because Mary loved the lamb, you know,

 

The teacher doth reply."

 

A passion for your topic, coupled with a compassion for your audience. As Cavett Robert says, "They don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care."

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys... [yet] there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what pupils have learned. (John Dewey, How We Think [1933])

Red coats -- wore red so that enlisted men wouldn't see blood if they were shot. "We" are the redcoats--we set the tone. (Kevin Eikenberry)

"...Increases in the production of unusual original, novel or clever responses have been reported by researchers who have instructed students to so respond." (Melba A. Colgrove, "Stimulating Creative Problem Solving," Psychological Reports (Vol. 22, 1968)

Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are. (William James, Talks to Teachers)

In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts. Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who meets with most success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable. A teacher should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do herself. "Come and let me show you how" is an incomparably better stimulus than "Go and do it as the book directs." Children admire a teacher who has skill. What he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest. She must first take one herself; then her example is effective as no exhortation can possibly be. Teaching people to recognize problems is literally teaching them to be experts. You need to help them recognize critical features and relationships, and you need to point out potential flaws. (Eric Skopec & Lance Kiely, Taking Charge)

Think only about what the students are experiencing.(Kevin Eikenberry)

The teacher who can get along by keeping spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the greatest skill. (William James, Talks to Teachers)

A wise teacher makes learning a joy; a rebellious teacher spouts foolishness. (Proverbs 15:2)

Do as the Romans Do...

The Latin word Ludum which means "to dare," and "to give free play to" is the same word that was used for "a training establishment".

The root origin of the word education is educare, which means to care for, nourish, cause to grow. To educate then, does not mean merely to inject with knowledge but to help to master the process of investigating what knowledge is for. (Steve Allen)

When training is effectively evaluated, it improves. When it isn't, it doesn't. (Clay Carr, Training Magazine June 1992)

Be yourself. Who else is better qualified? (Frank J. Giblin, III)

It's not style, but results that make the difference. (George Odoirne, How Mgrs. Make Things Happen)

To learn something, teach it.

One filled with joy preaches without preaching. (Mother Teresa)

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; only uninterested persons. (G. K. Chesterton, English author 1874-1936)

The better you care for yourself, the better you will do in class. (Melissa Mead, Win-Win)

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.

If [an instructor] is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

One of the most important aspects of teaching is to arouse a sense of wonder. (Rene' M. Querido, Creativity in Education)

The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure. (William James, Talks to Teachers)

President Ford to a teacher: I understand you teach the fifth grade. The teacher replied: No I teach children.

Students bring their pasts to the classroom, as well as their hopes for the future. We teachers need to understand both dimensions in order to teach well in the present. (C. Roland Christensen)

Teaching is like driving--always pay attention.(Kevin Eikenberry)

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)

Consider giving--not paying--attention to what students say. Paying implies a cold, impersonal commercial transaction; giving communicates colleagueship, sharing, community. (C. Roland Christensen)

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