Why We Struggle To Acquire Skills (And How The Mindset Of The Teacher Is The Root Cause)

A client of mine deals with teachers.

Not 10 or 50, but hundreds of teachers.

One day, quite out of the blue, she decided to do a rough poll.

It wasn't even a bunch of questions, but just one question.

And that one question went like this.

Who should bear the responsibility for learning? The teacher or the student? And as we know from experience, if we ask a single interesting question, we get a good response.

And she did get a good response.

A large majority of the teachers believed that the responsibility of any of the learning lies squarely with the student.

Hence, they lumped 100% of the burden on the heads of the students.

Other teachers were less heavy-handed.

A fair number put the figure at about 50-50, stating that the teacher had a responsibility, the student had a responsibility.

They had an equal sense of responsibility.

Yet one fact was very clear.

No one...

No one was willing to go so far as to say that 100% of the responsibility of the learning lies with the teacher.

I'll say it again.

100% of the responsibility of the learning lies with the teacher.

At this point, it's likely that you agree with at least the level-headed teachers.

Yes, it doesn't make any sense to simply wash your hands of the responsibility and say, oh, wait, 100% of the responsibility of learning lies with the student.

We're not so crazy.

We know that there is some sort of in-between place.

That 50-50 mark, that seems more reasonable.

It seems fair enough.

And this logic makes perfect sense until we change the analogy.