Leadership and Teaching That Learns

In his speech to a stadium full of people who waited hours in temperatures hovering around 100 degrees, Mr. Obama said that the nation needs “a fundamental change of perspective and attitude,” one that values substance over appearance, character over celebrity and wise investments over “get rich quick schemes.”

Amen, Mr. Obama. In reflecting about yesterday's post, I keep coming back to the notion that we need to learn to capture learning itself, not just the outcome of learning. By the same token, we need to model our own learning. True or not, the old paradigm in Education is Teacher as "Know-er", student as empty vessel.

Having earned a Bachelor's degree means we now have the right to seek a job, perhaps as a teacher if we also achieved teaching certification. But we're not done learning. Are we? Even after we've achieved a Master's or Advanced degree, do we know all that there is to know?
As long as we plant notions in our student's minds that there will be a point at which they will "arrive", we will fail to teach them anything valuable.

So much better are our students (and us) if we can learn with them. Or have them teach us. Doing so, however, requires a good bit of introspection to "let go and let learn". If we model his we will be fulfilling Obama's challenge: We will be modeling substance, honesty and integrity. We will have that elusive of all traits: Character. I'm reading: Leadership and Teaching That Learns Tweet this!