Speculation: Teachers’ Frequently Provided Solutions

I really do not understand why a trainer refuses to be a facilitator of knowledge. I am tired of seeing coaches and trainers, refusing to be mentors or teachers. Mostly they would come ‘prepared with a set of ideas to be articulated and ironically, that backfires.

Preparation is an integral part of delivering a speech which is a unidirectional process. There is minimal or hardly any participation from the receptor’s end. Teaching or even coaching someone is not so. Delivering your content or rather, meeting your target does not suffice. You can always plan your session in advance so that you do not run out of content and end up wasting the teaching time, but it behoves you to understand the challenges of your learners in approaching your content, i.e. the topic of discussion.

For example, every learner might not face the same sort of challenge to understand the concept of ‘article partitif’ while learning French or the law of supply and demand while studying Economics. It is futile to address the concern of an individual with the same set of probable answers by preparing a FAQ before your training session. If the concept of student-centred learning exists at all, I do not believe that it needs to be showcased with expensive workbooks or learning tools but in my understanding, it lies in customising your reaction and answers based on the individual nuances of learners’ block. In return, are you not also empowering yourself as a teacher?

I do not undermine the importance of lesson planning (though I find its frequently used rigid and prescribed structure completely inadavptive to the needs of the learners) and it is unfair to expect that a teacher can cater to the requirements of every student while addressing a large number of pupils. I am concerned about the situation when a particular learner is approaching the trainer with a query or a teacher is managing a relatively small group (10-15 people approximately) of students.

It seems that nowadays even school teachers turned steadfast followers of corporate training strategies.