Pastor + Author
The most innovative business educators will, we hope, recognize the importance of emotional intelligence in higher education for helping their graduates become leaders instead of mere managers.
Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis, Annie McKee – Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
Those who have the ability to imagine new services and new opportunities and new ways to recruit work…are the new Untouchables. Those with the imagination to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies will thrive.
Education is not a linear process of preparation for the future: it is about cultivating the talents and sensibilities through which we can live our best lives in the present and create the best futures for us all.
Current approaches to education and training are hobbled by assumptions about intelligence and creativity that have squandered the talents and stifled the creative confidence of untold numbers of people. This waste stems partly from an obsession with certain types of acadmic ability and from a preoccupation with standardized testing. The waste of talent is not deliberate…
The waste of talent may not be deliberate but it is systemic. It is systemic, because public education is a system, and it is based on deep-seated assumptions that are no longer true.
One of the main reasons for this massive waste of talent is the very process that is meant to develop it: education.
Watch this talk by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award, about changing education paradigms. He raises a lot of insightful points regarding the apparent and non-apparent outcomes of the enlightenment educational paradigm that has dominated our learning landscape.
He argues that “great learning happens in groups” and that “collaboration is the stuff of growth.” He also brings forward the argument that the habits of our institutions need to be altered, if significant change in education and, in turn, our society is to happen.
What would it look like if we thought differently about human capacity?
Watch this short film to learn and be amazed.
Lois Zachary does not only set out the basic principles and best practices of mentoring in The Mentor’s Guide, she actually goes a step further and helps readers discover their own personal mentoring style and preferences.
Through many exercises, she guides the reader through introspection and action. Thus, she not only conceptually ties mentoring to adult education, but she actually writes in a manner according to the principles of adult education.
Consequently, she challenges the prevailing myths of mentoring, and proposes a model of mentoring where both mentor and mentee are fully engaged and learning from one another. Her proposed model is one that is based on critical reflection and application, rather than knowledge transfer and acquisition (Location 300).
[Read more…] about Book Review: The Mentor’s Guide – Zachary
Jane Vella’s On Teaching and Learning is a magnificent follow-up book to the principles of dialogue education she laid out in Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach (2002).
In this book, Vella takes the principles of dialogue education and shows what it looks like to put them into action through both the traditional face-to-face educational setting and also in an online setting.
Dialogue education is not merely a pedagogy; it is more importantly a way to make society a place of peace (xix). Thus, teaching with dialogue education involves listening to learners, empowering them, and respecting them (xix). Consequently, the following statement appropriately sums up the necessary subconscious of dialogue educators – “the dialogue is not a dialogue between teachers and learner, but among learners, of whom the teacher is one” (xxi). [Read more…] about Book Review: On Teaching and Learning – Vella
Sharon Daloz Parks’ Leadership Can Be Taught is an examination and illumination of Ronald Heifetz’s teaching method at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
She not only gives the reader an in depth experience of being in Heifetz’s classroom, but she also translates his methodology into transferrable principles for leadership and teaching. She does this by dissecting the case-in-point approach that Heifetz uses. She also dismantles the notion that an individual is born a leader, and plots a way to develop presence – “the ability to intervene, to hold steady, inspire a group, and work in both verbal and nonverbal realms” (13).
In the second half of the book, Parks addresses the transferability of this approach to a variety of different situations, such as the workplace or different classroom settings. She then places herself in the shoes of a teacher, and examines the principles that teachers need to learn in order to teach with this methodology. The book closes with a critique on our culture’s myth of leadership and an evaluation of this method’s strengths and limits.
In a sense, Leadership Can Be Taught is a hybrid-workbook or pathway to help leaders, teachers, and organizations rethink leadership, teaching, and how to learn. [Read more…] about Book Review: Leadership Can Be Taught – Parks
While I don’t fully agree with the long term educational technology trends that TFE Research and Michell Zappa envision here, they did do a fantastic job presenting the landscape of educational technology for now and in the immediate future.
This is a burgeoning field and my hope is to see the church innovate and set the pace for education technology, rather than lag 5-10 years behind. Hopefully, I can be a part of that.
