The elephant in the room

Teacher absence in classes was the loudest complaint made by students in their recent feedback to their VC in a Delhi university. Do teachers bunk classes? This is what one would expect students to do.

Why do some teachers hate to teach? Is it because they cannot hold their students’ attention? Perhaps, their reading is inadequate, and they hate their subject. Pitted against Internet-savvy students armed with mobiles, they may be out of touch with reality.

The students’ concerns are legitimate. If they are not addressed soon, they will find other means to learn. The Internet and the idiot box are some powerful options: they offer more current and valuable content in six months than a graduate degree can in three years.

This threat may also apply to any business school course. Therefore, there is danger ahead for the teacher and his profession. 
Distance learning and e-learning are two more options to replace him. As travel becomes expensive, why go to a building (school) with teachers – who may be absent, or not be current - when you can read a business newspaper, watch TV or browse the Internet in the comfort of your home?

If teachers are to be respected, educational institutions must be made responsible for the development of their skills. Presently, their focus is on improving infrastructure. But how can another version of software, better flooring, and landscaping make teachers more attractive to students? Most often, their training is heavy in information - which can be acquired anywhere - and not on teaching methods and behaviour.

Such training may not be enough, and must be augmented by learning goals. Institution heads must direct teachers to learn anew, change behaviour, and make regular self-appraisals. They must push teachers to question and to change what they do. They must coax teachers to discover ways to connect with and move closer to students and their concerns.

Only then would teaching become an exciting profession of discovery and learning. Only then would the elephant leave us free to attend to bigger problems.

Whom would you choose? Mentor or coach?

Since quite some time, mentoring has been a popular practice in personal development. Why has coaching lost its charm?

There’s nothing wrong about either idea. But we may have misunderstood mentoring for what it could do. If so, it’s time to substitute it with coaching.

A mentor is more a distant adviser than a close guide to his protégé. As a patient listener, he gets a good idea about his protégé’s aspirations and talents. It is only then that he offers suggestions.

A coach is a trainer. He instructs his trainees, repeatedly, and oversees their development till they acquire sufficient ability to act, skillfully. He is closer to them and their successes, than a mentor and his protégé could ever be.

The mentor addresses a larger canvas of issues. The coach’s concern is limited to a smaller but better defined problem area. A mentor’s typical work is, for example, to help select which cycle to buy and which shop to buy it from. The coach directs the learner to ride the cycle, ably.

A coach is a tough taskmaster, and would not rest till his trainee’s learning is complete. He assumes responsibility for his trainee’s performances. The mentor may be a distant father figure, quite often, unaware of his protégé’s acts - and will distance himself from the results, if they were damaging.

Is mentoring more in demand than coaching because of its emotional appeal? Is coaching more rigorous, and therefore, less attractive to users?

Here are some thumb rules. If you are not sure what to do, find and ask a mentor. Don’t like his advice? Ignore it.

If you want to solve a problem but don’t know how, a coach can do it for you. He’s a pro, and will charge you for his services – so, do as he tells you.

The world’s best sportspersons depend on their coach. What about you?

Absenteeism, the dinosaur

Face-to-face interaction between students and their teacher is at the heart of conventional education. A full class of students is the right platform for vigorous attention to discuss and understand a topic.

However, when not in class, students lose many opportunities to hear and receive meaning. Rarely would they admit that such loss pulls down their marks – till they become parents, a generation later.

The students’ usual plea is that their classes are not ‘interesting’. But the teacher’s role is to explain and create awareness - not to entertain. By missing classes, a student fails to gain knowledge, becomes less able, and therefore, less valuable to a prospective employer.

One University in New Delhi had debarred many students from their examinations for not having minimum attendance in their classes. It had also shut down a graduate course for the same reason. Recently, its Vice-Chancellor berated their teachers for not guiding students to change their lives. These were bold actions and statements, but would they drive away the larger problem of absenteeism?

Private institutions may waive poor attendance citing the student’s ill-health or participation in off-campus extra-curricular activities. Is this a compromise, a surrender, or merely, pragmatism?

What is the value of a degree when the student has been needlessly absent? No employer would want to hire even a top-grade student if they suspected him to be irregular at work.

Superior academic performance is so critical to career entry. Therefore, let us begin by waiving minimum attendance and the term-end memory-based examinations. It would be more prudent to assess students' learning from off-campus assignments linked to their class presence, and from their in-class exercises, discussions and debates. 
Meanwhile, content and teaching process in class would keep pace with the students' understanding. This would compel teachers to learn along with their students!

And soon, we would have eliminated this animal called absenteeism from our schools and colleges.

Knowledge or ability?

Yesterday, when my electric wiring had a problem, did I ask the electrician about his knowledge? Of course not! All that I was interested in was his ability to fix the problem.

So, how does knowledge differ from ability? Knowledge is an immobile asset, while ability is both poetry and prose in motion. Ability makes things happen, because it converts ideas, irreversibly, into value for you and me.

The first ingredient in ability is your understanding (of something), often confused for knowledge. The difference between understanding and knowledge is simple. If you can instinctively describe something in your own words, even if it disagrees with others’ views, you have an understanding. But if you need a book to explain it, then you have knowledge.

The next ingredient is your urge to use your understanding to solve a problem. Now, a problem is not necessarily something that irritates or hurts you, somebody, or some part of the world. It could be merely an issue that arouses your curiosity, and you ask, ‘Why not do something about it?’

The third ingredient is an interest to convert that provocation into a series of steps to solve that problem. Therefore, you must dare to experiment, laugh at failure, and be persistent with attempts till you find your best solution. Sometimes, luck favours you with opportunity and authority to test or use your solution. When nothing happens, as is often the case, you don’t give up. Remember the tale of Edison and his 2,000 experiments to make the electric bulb work?

Wise employers will go beyond knowledge, and will be concerned only about what their people can do. Therefore, employees need to learn how to convert their knowledge into ability. And educational institutions must help their students to become not only informed but also able.

Albert Einstein couldn’t have put it better, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. And imagination cannot work without the urge to transform what you understand into what you can do with your understanding.

New lessons in recruitment

According to recent media reports, this year’s grads in economics and commerce will get annual salary packages as hefty as business school students used to. Such recruits were from colleges located in metropolises, and therefore, suggestive of a strong understanding of the English language. So, how does a generic degree grad become as valuable to a recruiter as a post-grad in management education?

Some employers recruited students with multimedia exposure. Here’s one clue that modern job applicants should be savvy about e-technology. Would you have ever believed that ordinary Internet behaviour – browsing, emailing, social networking, chatting, and blogging – and texting habits could earn you a job?

Content writing was another area of recruiter search. Not being a business function like marketing or finance, it is not on the career horizon of business school students. Without any professional qualifications or a post-grad degree, a student with good grammar and vocabulary gets an entry into the exalted world of the copywriter and the journalist, perhaps in the super-dynamic electronic media. Commerce grads were recruited because qualified people expressed no interest for finance jobs. Employers would now train these grads and prepare them for finance functions. 
It reminds me of the infrastructure company whose engineers either refused to or could not climb their transmission towers for repairs. So, what did it do? It hired ITI diploma students (who were also cheaper) and trained them to climb and do more than their better qualified engineering cousins.

These events offer valuable lessons in threats and opportunities for recruiters, students, and their educational institutions.

1. Recruiters are impatient, and will now hunt for talent across the country. If they do not find that talent, they will hire from lower rungs of the educational ladder, and train them.

2. Students must be very good at Internet and related behaviour. Whatever their studies or interest, they must become e-smarter than their peers.

3. Institutions must urge their students to acquire other abilities, especially written English, beyond their chosen discipline of study.

Towards the discovery of learning

It’s not till one is (or feels) educated that he begins to wonder about learning. Some think that learning is awareness, understanding or clarity. Others think that it includes knowledge under certain contexts. Language, literacy, and intelligence are some aspects of learning that you may have also heard of.

Learning is also about the learner’s experience. Experiences include data and information, as much as they contain emotions, opinion, and judgement. It is these experiences that change the learner – and change is the surest sign of the impact of learning.

Learning, as a subject, can be great fun to study. Have you ever seen a year-old infant learning to take his first walking steps? Learning could also be extremely serious, as in formal research. Serious research becomes exciting when it leads to revelations that we call discovery.

In this blog, we intend to look at different aspects of learning, whatever the discipline. We will attempt to translate dense research findings into everyday language. Sometimes, we will laugh, politely, at accepted ‘wisdom’, hoping to invite thoughtful debate. We would eagerly respond to current news, if we could mine it for a nugget of learning, there.

How well one learns depends on his personality as much as what he does and what happens to him. The pace of his learning is as interesting to us as the mechanics of his learning. We hope to cover, share and discuss even more with readers.

We will challenge, explore, and provoke someone or something, once in a while. As in all efforts, our material may not agree with or satisfy you, every time. But we will always keep it relevant and valuable on the mysteries of learning.