| Friday, July 9, 2010

What is the solution to good teaching and effective learning? What makes a good teacher? What role should a teacher play in their students’ lives? What should a student expect from their teacher? What should a teacher demand of their students?

I’ve had ‘Marva Collins’ Way’ on my reading list for a long time, and I’m starting to discover her answers to these questions. Marva Collins is famous for teaching 4-year olds the classics and has twice been invited by US presidents to become Education Secretary—and has twice refused.

Teachers and school administrators from all over the world travel to her Chicago prep school to find out what she’s up to.

What’s her secret?

Well, I’m sure there’s much more to come in the following chapters but she certainly seems convinced of starting with the teacher’s attitude, which we might sum up for the moment with a phrase she uses—‘implacable devotion’:

“I promise you are going to do, you are going to produce. I am not going to let you fail.” … “To get a child to learn, a teacher must first care.”

The introduction has lots of unfavourable statistics comparing US education to Japanese education. In the US, one in four students drop out before entering the workforce, compared to the 96% of Japanese kids who finish high school. Elite US students are put on the same level as average Japanese ones in maths.

We’ve all read lots of articles over the years in our own countries which would bear similar witness to shoddy learning achievements in our own schools.

If you’re wondering whether this might be a one-off, impossible to reproduce in other schools, Marva thinks otherwise:

“There is nothing we do at Westside Preparatory School that cannot be duplicated at any school in the country.”

Maybe you could mix Marva Collins with Michael Gerber and come up with something funky.

And for those of us who work with private tuition of one sort or another, these thoughts beget other questions: what would happen if you told an employee that you would never let him fail? What would happen if you told your client that you would never let him fail?

Let them quit whenever they want (some will anyway) but let them know that—for as long as they are in your charge in some way—you will drive them hard and never let them fail.