I don’t remember where I heard this story a long time ago but I have returned to it time and time again, I get the chance to speak to different audiences to explain the difference between education and teaching. And so the story goes like this..
‘There is a Janitor in a girls school (don’t know why it’s a girls school) who is called by the Head Teacher to investigate a problem where the girls keep kissing the mirror in the girls toilets with lipstick and putting the big “Marilyn Monroe lipstick marks” on the mirror. The Janitor reassures the Head Teacher that he will be able to sort this and asks for all the girls in a specific year group to be brought to the toilets so he can do a demonstration. The Janitor explains to the girls that “kissing the mirror with lipstick on causes a considerable amount of work”, causing hilarity and mirth amongst the gathered crowd. The Janitor says he would like to show them how difficult it is to get the lipstick off the mirror and promptly takes a window brush, puts its down the toilet around the U bend to wet it and starts to scrub the lipstick off the mirror.
The mirror never gets kissed again’.
Education is the ability to inspire through some means or another a change in behaviour of the people it engages with. Teaching is different: it is very difficult to educate large groups of people because it is very difficult to get inside the heads of large groups of people consistently as everybody is different. When trying to impart the intellectual property (education is about imparting intellectual property) to individuals it’s best to be able to provide a bespoke environment where you can assess what is required for each individual and tailor the knowledge exchange in a specific way.
We try to educate at The Campbell Academy; we don’t try to teach. It’s also essential in education to get ‘buy-in’ from the people who are trying to be educated because in the end it’s the people trying to be educated who need to do the majority of the work.
One of the main problems in teaching is that we pay people to stand up in front of a group who expect to have their mouths opened like baby birds and have information imparted upon them. In my mind this is not how things work. The best environments of education are small groups of people, finding out what they want and what they need. Explain to them what they will have to do to get that and then support them in that route. Most online education doesn’t do that and in fact, in my experience, most of the courses I attend don’t do that either. Working to a syllabus assuming everybody is the same and refusing to teach anything different to that reduces the possibility of imparting intellectual property and emotional intelligence onto people who will then be set free to develop them self.
In a world that I live in we are pushing masses of new technology into the healthcare sector, education and adoption of these are the only things that work. If you sell an expensive piece of kit to a dental practice and don’t teach them how to use it and how to adopt it into their daily workflow you’ve wasted your time and created a disgruntled customer who has over spent.
Just a quick heads up also, there is some education in Implant dentistry happening with us on 20th September, Stephen Barter’s Masterclass. Stephen has just written a fantastic book with the ITI about Treatment with the Elderly Patient. If you think you are not in the business of treating the elderly patient then you must be moving to another country, if you want some education in those aspects you can have a free evening with the ITI study club if you’re a ITI member (or haven’t been to 2 free ones yet) and you can have a Masterclass during the day with a small group of people where education will happen.
Contact us if you are interested.
Blog post number: 1370
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