Teaching Pt. 5

I have been talking in broad terms with regard to the framework of the model of teaching. The core is built around the coaching model, so in order to best help use develop the framework, we need a specific coaching model to work from. One of the best if not the best coaching books available is Successful Coaching by Rainer Martens. The more I read the book the more methods I see that could applied to teaching. The great advantage of the book is that it is self contained and covers nearly all aspects of coaching in a logical format.

This book can help educators develop a set of teaching principles, based on experiment, that can be exported to any school. Though, I believe that we might have to customize the approach to 3 categories, rural, suburban, and urban schools.

An advantage of the book is that it does not give a list of rules to follow, rather a set of guidelines for the coach to develop his own program based on the most effective approaches. This allows the flexibility necessary to adapt teaching to different environments.

Failure Analysis

Any educational program designed according to coaching model should be tested to the breaking point. This is not intended to discredit the approach, rather to analyze where the program failed and how it can be repaired. In this respect it may be good to take the engineering approach, you perform a stress test, when the system fails you perform a failure analysis to determine which part or parts failed and why. One of the best failure analysis methods is Failure mode and effects analysis.

Another idea that might be helpful in educational systems planning is futures techniques. Though I think it may be quite on the fringe, it nevertheless may prove helpful.

The coaching model is the "workhorse" of the educational system, with the other ideas on the periphery meant to help increase the effectiveness of the coaching model. The educational systems analysis is meant to approach education on a broader scale, possibly on the scale of school or several schools.

More ideas later.

John Gonzalez