We've all had bad teachers, and we've all experienced hard-to-use educational content. For the most part, education today is still a hit or miss proposition. You're lucky if you find that one in a million stellar teacher that inspires you to learn!
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As we face an economic crisis of unknown size, those businesses that survive the Pandemic must re-invent themselves to address both new markets and volatile business conditions. With shrunken and interrupted revenue and supply chain disruption, businesses must look to all available means to gain efficiencies.
As communities look to recover from the COVID Pandemic, a good starting point is to build new housing for local workers.
Prior to the Pandemic, a shortage of six million low-income housing units was already a crisis. With 30+ million newly unemployed, the need for economical housing is soaring. Addressing this key community challenge presents an opportunity to create jobs now.
The pandemic has created a situation where parents are homeschooling, and teachers are trying to teach online. Out of frustration, some school districts want to close the school year. What will students do educationally for the rest of this school year and throughout the summer?
The problem is that parents are not prepared to homeschool, and may not have the time since they are trying to work from home.
Teachers are not used to teaching online with the current tools available to them.
As the number of diagnosis and deaths from the COVID Pandemic decrease, we face an economic recovery challenge of unprecedented scale. The challenge for each small business is how do they participate in recovery:
- Lone wolf
- Community leader
- Piggyback
- Do nothing
While talking with many businesses in different states, the general thought has been that the future is not clear. Nothing is certain. Going forward will face a new ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’.
Once you've identified the concepts that you want to teach (see An Easier Way To Define Training Goals) you have a clear plan of what needs to be taught. The next question becomes "How do you teach each concept?" There are several principles that we can apply that ensures mastery every time.
One of the biggest challenges in training is identifying your students' knowledge gaps and having a strategy for dealing with them.
Generally, you want to identify certain performance goals for your trainees. That sets the target, and then after your intervention, you will want to test to see that those goals have been achieved.
When it comes to developing instruction, are you an artisan, or are you an engineer? What's the difference?
An artisan builds each widget as a unique and unrepeatable project. If the artisan builds a chair, even though we all know the function of a chair and a chair's general characteristics, the artisan will build the chair from scratch. Each leg or arm will be turned and sanded lovingly. The surface will be polished and oiled until it is a work of art. It is beautiful, but it will also be expensive because all of that loving care takes time.
What is the most important challenge in education today?
It is being able to teach students when they have some free time, when they are not distracted, and only what they need to know at the moment.
Studies show that people forget 70% of what they learned 24 hours after training. So, it is essential that people only learn what they are most interested in learning at the moment. Usually, that is to solve an immediate problem.
One summer, when I was in elementary school, I was terrified! You see, by the end of the school year I had not yet memorized the Times Table and I knew that I'd be entering the upcoming school year clearly disadvantaged. I imagined a disappointed teacher and my embarrassment and humiliation amongst my schoolmates. That is pretty much what happened!