Heroes Not Zombies

Pick the Brain has a great post about teaching and learning. It’s called The Movie Director’s Guide to Effective Teaching. In it, Victor Stachura, the author refers to William Glasser’s theories. Well, this is new to me. I’ve never heard of William Glasser. If you have, what do you think about his ideas and his suggestions? There’s a William Glasser Institute and my little browsing there so far has interested me. I want to find out more. Victor Stachura highlights something he read about learning and teaching from studying William Glasser –

“We Learn . . .
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach others.”

I don’t know about you, but that seems intuitively correct to me. I might take issue with the actual figures used and I also think it doesn’t allow for the processing preferences highlighted from the work of things like the NLP approach which helps us to understand that we are different and some process auditory information better than others, some visual information, and yet others kinesthetic information. However, with that in brackets, the overall thrust of this seems right.

If you are involved in teaching this is an important observation and if you want to learn, it’s equally important. It certainly highlights the importance of what is known as active learning. Sitting attempting to learn passively by just listening or just watching something isn’t easy. But when you have something to read, something to see and to hear, and then you discuss it, you will learn so much more. The challenge beyond that I think is to experience and to teach. I don’t know if you can experience much in a classroom, can you? Don’t you need to get out and actually live what you’re learning? I certainly think that’s true of medical training. Can’t see how you become a good doctor without actually doing it! That last step of teaching so works for me! I find that almost every time I teach, not only in the preparation stage, but also in the delivery, I learn something new myself.

I ran a training day based around characters in Lord of the Rings last week and not only did it convince me that I’ve learned more about my subject than ever, but the feedback from the students was about the best I’ve ever had. The day involved film clips from the Lord of the Rings movies and various small and plenary discussion groups. It was active and interactive all day long.

If you teach, how much do you use movie clips? I use them a lot. I find that not only do they combine the auditory and visual stimulation we need, but they are great for getting discussion going and, fundamentally, they provide the group with an experience – usually something involving both thought and emotion.

To return to the blog post which has seeded this one – the main focus of the piece refers to the “primacy-recency” phenomenon – the finding that we remember the first and last things in a sequence better than the things in the middle. Victor Stachura recommends we deal with this in teaching not just by putting important information at the beginning and the end, but by breaking up the lecture every 15 minutes with some audience exercise, or discussion, to keep attention from waning. He points out that good movie directors know this and change the pace of the movie frequently to achieve a similar effect.