Teaching and how it applies to us.

We teach. Every one of us. If we have a classroom of students, it is obvious, but also when we talk to colleagues, we sometimes try to teach them something (even if it is only our point of view).

I spoke last time about the teaching horrors that modern textbooks have. Well, this video by Dan Meyer explains why the textbooks are absolutely not helping to teach by asking the questions wrong, and he proposes an alternative way to pose the questions. He also, by the way, has a nice blog full of examples of how to get a class of students to actually think.

This gets me thinking. How can we apply this to our presentations? Are we really engaging our audience by starting with a “talk outline”, or should we pose the final question as simple as possible and work from there? I will be experimenting with this and I will let you know how it goes!