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When you teach or are engaged to teach or better still, to educate, you accept a payment (generally) in one form or another.

What you hope for then is engagement of the people that you have been instructed to engaged to educate in the hope that they will take the information that you give them and make it into something wonderful.

Take the teacher who teaches children how to read, then watches them learn to read and use the skill of reading to enhance, improve and enrich their life.

On a smaller and less dramatic scale, that is how I see teaching in education in my own small little insignificant industry.

Last week was dominated by the last module of the business course, which is a huge undertaking of ours, but most so for the people who attend.

They pay to come and we get paid, but what we hope is that they will engage and therefor reach the end of the course having become better and different and altered in a way that will influence many, many more people and we can possibly influence ourselves individually.

All of us who provide this course understand that, so we are nervous at the end when they come back with what they’re supposed to have learned.

One of the things that happens on the final module of the course is that we give the groups scenarios that they haven’t seen before and send them away for a couple of hours as a mixed-up group, asking them to solve the problem and develop a plan.

Group one this year was given the concept of setting up a private squat dental practice in an affluent area and told to put together a plan which would take that through for the next three years.

They had about two hours to do this including production of a presentation that they could present back to the other groups over half an hour.

If you would like to see that presentation then hit reply and I will send it to you, if you are thinking of setting up a squat dental practice or you’re working in dental business yourself and are wondering what to do, you should see it, it is a work of genius.

What was more rewarding even than seeing the presentation itself was to hear the group say that they would never be able to write that presentation before they had attended the course.

Out of shear vanity I asked them what they felt the presentation would look like if I had asked them to do it on day one, (perhaps I should do that on next years course and then repeat the process at the end). More rewarding even than that again, was at the start of the project on day one of module 6, I appointed a “managing director” to each of the projects and those managing directors were practice managers, not principles.

Without going into the embarrassing aspects of naming people who were there, the person who took control of group one was absolutely outstanding, in a way that we have not seen even throughout the course.

They came alive, they led the group and they produced a presentation which you can have, if you hit reply.

This exercise provided so many different points to reflect upon and discuss, but one of those is the fact that you have people sat within your own business waiting to be set free, just looking for permission to go and unless you give them permission, nothing will happen.

You might have to take a chance and sometimes it might not work, but really what do you have to lose? And look what you could gain.

At the end of the day, the individual in question, who had been the managing director of group one came to me to say thank you for the course and everything that they had gained.

Lots of people had done that, particularly the principle, but this was different the person told me that they had been thinking of leaving dentistry, right up until the first module of the course. They were intrigued by the first module but still not convinced but by the end of the course, the way that their relationship had changed with their principle and their job had changed within the organisation, they could now see themselves in dentistry for the rest of their careers.

Imagine that, imagine if you were me and that was your job.

I got paid for that, but the conversation at the end of the course with the “managing director” increased my payment by a factor of about a thousand.

As I said above, if you would like to see the presentation (and I have permission to share) hit reply and ask and I will send.

Blog Post Number - 2168