To anyone who has ever done any form of teaching or tutoring there is one thing that goes without saying, you learn a lot from teaching. Not only does your understanding of the content you teach take on a new dimension, but you begin to learn how differently different people take in information, understand it and make sense of it in their own mind.

I am constantly blown away by the importance of the way we teach over the importance of what we are teaching. I can sit down for an hour and simultaneously teach two youngster and they both come away with completely differing and unique understandings of what I have taught. Teaching forces you to look at yourself and really understand what you are portraying.

I am even going to go as far as saying the less teaching and more listening I do the more beneficial the outcome to the student. In my experience, I would rather let a student battle with a question, get it wrong, ask them some pertaining questions about their reasoning for doing it a certain way, let them get it wrong again until they then figure out why, even if it takes the whole lesson. In maths especially, I encourage the student to say out loud what they are doing, speak their logic, and I start a technical conversation between myself and the student. This is perhaps the Socratic method, where my student learns by answering their own questions, and I learn by hearing my student answer them.

Our classrooms are places of one-way conversational traffic, teacher speaks, and then students ask questions. It doesn’t allow students to have a conversation amongst themselves, well not in a constructive manner at least. Most of the time when students talk amongst themselves in class it is not related to what the teacher is teaching, but that’s because we don’t teach students the skills of constructive, truth-finding, intellectual discussion. Ultimately we don’t teach students to teach.

In my decade of tutoring, and I know it is not a lot, I have seen that it is extremely important for a student to speak out loud, and actively solve problems. I continue to educate myself in the skill of listening to a student. When they ask questions I really search for that sentence, explanation or metaphor that will imprint the understanding of the concept on their mind. The only reason I understand that this is a valuable skill is from teaching, this leads me onto my final point.

Education requires, (i) discussion, (ii) patience, (iii) mentorship and (iv) practice. So to teach requires the skills of discussion, the virtue of patience, the desire to be a mentor and the determination to practice. A student may learn these same skills and more if they are taught to teach. Our country has a severe lack of teachers, so why don’t we educate our children to teach, get our Grade 9’s to tutor our Grade 8’s, and the Grade 10’s the Grade 9’s etc? Just for a 30 minutes a day, every day. If there is one thing our country needs, it is to be educating a generation of mentors.

Never Stop Learning. Never Stop Teaching.

Matthew & The SkillUp Team

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