You have signed up and paid for a lesson (pick your subject or topic) where a ten page Power Point presentation is passively shared by the instructor and is then passively received by yourself over the course of an hour. Some will even pay money to do this. What learning has occurred and what value was obtained?

Imagine that to become a Medical Doctor, all that you had to do was listen to or read for yourself a two thousand page Power Point. All the knowledge necessary to be a doctor is in there. You can even pass a test at the end, demonstrating that you have memorized that content. You would still not be a doctor that I would chose to go to.

Lessons, teachers, instructors and passive knowledge are available everywhere. Libraries, Google, Wikipedia and thousands of other resources are full of knowledge yet to be taken in and applied by yourself as an active learning. As educator Myles Horton once quoted, “We make the road by walking.”

The accountability of an applied learning process lies with the student and not the teacher. The teachers/coaches/leaders job is to help students/players/professionals learn how to learn in application for themselves. To work to establish conditions that engage others and set the stage so that specific knowledge is shared with motivation and purpose with the student to apply it into their lives. Great teachers won’t want to build a following, but rather to build other teachers and leaders from what they have actively and then genuinely learned.

Make the road by walking.

“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.” — John Holt —

MITM