Faith in the Learner

Teaching people is a tricky thing. It requires a lot of faith and trust – not in the teacher, but in the student.

People who teach for a living in any capacity can shoot themselves in the foot by not starting with that faith. One of the most basic elements you need to trust is that the student wants to be there. This isn’t always a safe assumption, of course – if you’re a middle-school teacher, most of your learners are emphatically there against their will and you have to basically force them to learn. Of course, this is a clear case of the rules of the system actually hurting the learning process – if teachers were allowed to ignore the students who didn’t want to be there, they’d be much more effective at teaching the ones who did.

Most training professions that focus on teaching adults, whether college professors, corporate trainers, sports coaches, or anything like that should absolutely begin with the assumption that their students want to learn, though. You can’t care more than they do about their learning outcome. If you do, you’ll undercut their entire learning process. They’ll become passive and maybe 20% of what you teach will stick. Learning for a grade is radically different than learning for a skill.

The other major factor you have to trust, at any age level, is the existing skill set of your learners. It’s not just an incredible waste of time to try to teach things that your learners already know, it actively hurts the process of teaching them things that they don’t. If you start teaching a class of learners what they already know, they shut you out completely. They write you off, confident that they don’t need you. It also kills the rapport you need to build – nobody likes being talked down to.

When you teach, start with faith. Ask questions and be open, ready to hear before you start trying to dump your brain out into theirs. Use what you learn to target your teaching to the most direct, desired, and needed areas. Watch the learning bloom.