The Seven Keys to Great Teaching

There are seven areas that I focus on while I am mentoring my kids. They seem very simple but they are of great importance when it comes to A Thomas Jefferson Education.

Allow me to quote Oliver DeMille....

There are seven principles of successful education; when they are applied, learning occurs. When they are ignored or rejected, the quantity and quality of education decreases. Whatever the student’s individual interests or learning styles, these principles apply.

And whatever your role in education—home, public, private, higher education or corporate training—the application of any and eventually all of the seven keys will significantly improve your effectiveness and success.

1. Classics, not textbooks:  Great ideas are most effectively learned directly from the greatest thinkers, historians, artists, philosophers and prophets, and their original works. Great works inspire greatness, just as mediocre or poor works usually inspire mediocre and poor achievement.

This first key means that in pursuit of a transformational education, in preference to second- or third-generation interpretations, we study original sources — the intellectual and creative works of the world’s great thinkers, artists, scientists, etc., in the form they were produced.

2. Mentors, not Professors:  The professor/expert tells the students, invites them to conform to certain ideas and standards, and grades or otherwise rewards/punishes them for their various levels of conformity.

In contrast, the mentor finds out the student’s goals, interests, talents, weaknesses, strengths and purpose, and then helps him develop and carry out a plan to prepare for his unique mission.

Parents and teachers who apply the Seven Keys can be an effective part of the mentoring of a student in the early phases of learning, and help prepare the individual to fully take advantage of the influence of later mentors that will be formative for continued development and achievement.

3. Inspire, not Require:  None of the keys is as highly celebrated and as poorly applied as this one. This is perhaps the least understood and least practiced of the Seven Keys. It is probably the single most important element of Leadership Education.

There are really only two ways to teach—you can inspire the student to voluntarily and enthusiastically choose to do the hard work necessary to get a great education, or you can attempt to require it of them.

Instead of asking, “what can I do to make these students perform?” the great teacher says, “I haven’t yet become truly inspirational. What do I need to do so that these students will want to do the hard work to get a superb education?”

4. Structure Time, not Content:  Great mentors help their students establish and follow a consistent schedule, but they don’t micromanage the content.

Of course, this principle is applied differently at different levels of student development...

Phases of Learning: There are 4 phases of learning: Core Phase, Love of Learning Phase, Scholar Phase, and Depth Phase. I will talk about these phases in my next post.

5. Quality, not Conformity: With the student feeling inspired and working hard to get a great education, the mentor should give appropriate feedback and help.

But the feedback should ideally not take the form of common “grading”, but rather personalized feedback, commenting on the particular strengths of a work, including clarity of expression, original thought, technical precision, correlation of principles and ideas, effectiveness of argumentation or other reader appeal, etc.

These are clearly directed toward the evaluation of a written work, but similar concepts can be adapted for feedback on other products of a student’s scholarly efforts, be they organizational, artistic, personal, interpersonal, innovative, etc. Great teachers and schools reward quality–quality work and quality performance.

6.Simplicity, not Complexity: The more complex the curriculum, the more reliant the student becomes on experts, and the more likely the student is to get caught up in the Requirement/Conformity trap.

This leads to effective follower training, but is more a socialization technique than an educational method.

Education means the ability to think, independently and creatively, and the skill of applying one’s knowledge in dealing with people and situations in the real world.

Great teachers train great thinkers, and great leaders, by keeping it simple: students study the greatest minds and characters in history in every field, write about and discuss what is learned in numerous settings, and apply what is learned in various ways under the tutelage of a mentor.

7. YOU, not Them: If you think these principles are about improving your child’s or student’s education, you will never have the power to inspire them to do the hard work of self-education.

Focus on your education, and invite them along for the ride.

Read the classics in all fields, find mentors who inspire and demand quality, structure your days to include study time for yourself, and become a person who inspires great education.

A parent or teacher doesn’t have to be an “expert” to inspire great education (the classics provide the expertise), but he does have to be setting the example.

So there you have it, the Seven Keys... what I'm trying to accomplish in my home on a daily basis.  I find it hard some days to stay off  "the conveyor belt" but when I find myself "on the conveyor best", I get off as quickly as I can. It can be so hard to break away from what you've always known, even if you know it's not what's best for you. We are such creatures of habit and tend to find our wheels back in the same old ruts.

Slowly but surely I'm getting there. I'm understanding more and more that I can't educate my children....they have to educate themselves!!

Knowledge truly is Freedom....true knowledge...Liber! 

Liber (Latin): the root word in Library and Liberty!!  Without Liber there is no true education nor true liberty!!

<3