by Mattias Sjovall
Stockholm, 2018
Teaching nowadays is practiced in many contexts and with ever changing groups of students.
Basically, there used to be one main public school for everyone and one authoritative teacher telling you what things you need to learn, what things you needed to memorize and what proven methods to learn in order to solve standard problems. Why and how.
When you talk to individuals about their attendance at school in younger years they tend to remember their childhood in terms of exactly what teachers they appreciated and considered as great teachers (and also with clarity remember the worst ones). Why were the great teachers appreciated as teachers? Common explanations describe aspects of the teacher as; just, distinct, acted with clarity, competent, easy to understand and often the teacher saw you.
I would rank teaching as one of the most underestimated professions we have. In relation to how important it is for people and the society.
Teaching that generates true results achieved in the student’s mind and as practical and usable abilities, and sometimes with this great feeling as a student to have arrived at next stage or phase on a development curve.
The biggest issue I experience is when students, or customers, don’t really understand. They just learn enough to survive the moment. Or they honestly don’t understand and their solution is to learn the method, memorize and pass the test. There could be various reasons for this behavior but many times the problem is that no one seems to be there with the ability and time to explain the topic for the student in a reasonable and understandable way. It’s not always a lazy student’s fault, most times it is the inability of a teacher to teach a topic in a comprehensible manner. Because they just present facts and hand out tasks. Or apply some standardized approach, not enough customization. When you start to treat and look upon students as customers and vice versa something happens, you might learn something and change your attitude and approach. Yes, the customer is paying and everything you do is dependent on the customer’s response, but you can’t blame them for inabilities, you need to figure out how you as a vendor could better meet their needs. And the same goes for students, you can’t blame bad results on bad students all the time (I am aware and have experienced that there are situations where no teaching seems to help and instead you need something else, like a high ranking military officer threating with penalties...). Basically, you just need to do the teaching job better.
If you want to achieve remarkable teaching you need to start thinking in other ways. And that starts in the student’s mind. Their state of mind.
This is the time for remarkable teachers, modern teachers, with all the data floating around and with the ultra-speed changes we experience every week, we truly would appreciate it if someone could step forward and explain, describe and teach what is happening. Nicely, calmly and simply, sketch out the patterns, let us see how data points are connected and why. Someone needs to do this with skill, humility, a sense of pedagogy and deliver with some level of entertainment.
A modern teacher and preacher.
Why is it that you rarely experience a truly good teacher in a business context? Or a marketing and sales practice that you actually appreciate? How can companies over and over again choose unappreciated ways to engage with their customers instead of simply helping the customers to understand how things work in the context of the product?
I have provided answers to that and built the case for a new approach.
The truth is that sometimes I as a customer am in the mood for yes, I want to understand it all, but other times I simply feel I don’t care about all details or how it really works, just tell me what is best for me, but in order to follow someone’s advice I need to trust them. And that trust is easily established for a person who seem to be able to explain how it all works. A teacher’s voice.
Great teaching creates trust.
And all commercial actors know that trust is the golden place to be. All kinds of profitable effects come from that, especially customer loyalty.
But is there a magical skill in becoming a great teacher? Why haven’t business people made this their number one skill to be good at? Aside from closing business techniques. At least their customer facing professionals. After an infinite number of classes in presentation skills, how can it be that very few people seem to be able to calmly explain how things work? And not just to stack up memorized sales arguments and try to make it look like education, that is just selling in disguise. And I as a student or a customer see and hear it, and become tired and unfortunately none the wiser. But I do get kind of used to it.
Personally, since I have been working on teaching and presentation skills for many years now as a teacher, marketer, sales professional, consultant, manager and leader, I frequently get the feedback from satisfied students, customers and colleagues that they finally understood, thank you very much.
However, we need to crack the code to being great teachers.
Great teachers in modern versions, delivering explanations in short versions, highly pedagogic, sometimes personalized and in an enter- taining manner, build on an updated foundation of knowledge of the topic, from a gigantic ocean of digital and physical information.
A storyteller who summarizes and gives actionable insights.
Enough rambling about the business case, the reasons behind and the overall approach to the challenge, I assume you get the point more than well. The Why and What are fairly obvious now.
Let’s look into the How and The Cassiopeia Method.