This Blog post is a departure away from my usual writing.  As some of you may know I’m as passionate about coach education as I am about coaching itself.  As part of my journey to becoming a coach educator I am now enrolled on a teaching qualification.

 

For those of you who are in the fortunate role to provide Coach Education I just thought I would share with you a few key learnings from my first two days on the Level 3 Award in Education & Training (AET).  I love being able to reflect on my own education journey and think how I will change the way I do things to influence the next generation.

 

It’s that old cliche that if you pick up one key pearl of wisdom it will be worth going.  Well my biggest pearl was to be introduced to Sir Ken Robinson.  Our tutor showed us this Youtube video just before lunch to give us something to discuss over lunch. I was gripped.

 

 

You can watch the whole lecture here

 

Sir Ken is an educationalist who encouraged me to think about creativity and divergent thinking, an essential capacity for creativity.  Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.  Divergent thinking is the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question and the ability to think laterally.  There are so many achievements that characterise the ascent of human culture.  But in his opinion we destroy this natural creativity in the way we educate people.

 

The education system:  ”They’re trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past, and along the way they’re alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose of going to school.” 

 

”There is an intellectual apatite where Vocational training is seen as not as good as academic training.  Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period of the history of the Earth.  They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: from computers, from Iphones, from advertising hoarding, from hundreds of television channels.  And we’re penalising them from getting distracted…..from what….??”

 

Boring lessons!!!!!!!

 

Not everyone will benefit from a standardised way of learning, being force fed information that they may or may not be interested in.

 

Death by Powerpoint:

 

 

We’re still getting our children through education by anaesthetising them rather than waking them up!!

 

Group work:

 

Instead most great learning happens in GROUPS.  Collaboration is the stuff of Growth.  But yet we have achievement standards that learners need to reach by working in isolation on a test paper where there is only one answer!  We need a shift from an industrial metaphor of education to an agricultural one.  Human organisations are not like mechanisms (even though organisational charts still represent most organisations like this) they are like organisms. The way you work in an organisation is deeply affected by how you feel about it.

 

My challenge:

 

So I challenged myself to think out of the box and give a 15 minute presentation on Strength & Conditioning without the use of powerpoint.

 

Before I did my presentation I had a really good session on Delivery Methods.  We did a group brainstorm on different delivery methods we could use to share information and here is a photo of the brainstorm on the flip chart.

 

 

So fuelled with lots of ideas I went and did my presentation.

 

The presentation was really well received and it gave me a lot of satisfaction in achieving the learning objectives without being constrained to the use of powerpoint.  Rather than just tell people by showing them words on a page and reading them off, I cultivated group discussions, I showed them videos and I got them to do some practical tasks.  This is what our tutor meant by Tell > Show > Do, where learning sticks more, the more INVOLVED you are in it!

 

 

Out of interest compare how much information you took in when you listened to Sir Ken speak on the full 55 minute lecture and just focused on the words, with the 10 minute illustrated version where you were constantly looking at pictures too!  They say a picture paints a thousand words!

 

Go out there and be creative!!!!!!!