I have many a fond memory of my time as a lecturer and tutor at Zanzibar School of Health, a visionary learning institution in Zanzibar training today’s young minds to become tomorrow’s health care professionals. But the memories that stand out the most to me as an educator while there are of those moments when two of my students would ask me questions that I didn’t have the answers to, despite my mastery of the subjects.
To echo the sentiment of the late Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, that the greatest joy for a teacher is when his students surpass him, those moments carried for me such a sentiment. It is precisely at those kind of moments that the teacher is reminded that learning is a continuous, dynamic and beautiful lifelong process and that even the “expert” can never know it all.
A quote attributed to Alice Wellborn reads,
“The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask which he finds it hard to answer.”
Engaging in Socratic dialogues and reading up further, my students and I took our learning together to another level.
While pursuing my post graduate studies in Education, my dissertation focused on the learning methods used by top performing A level students. Amidst my interviews of many such students, there was one student who pleasantly surprised me when she said that she learns best by teaching her friends. Among the various effective, time-tested study methods, she found teaching her friends very helpful in her own learning.
This approach to learning falls along the lines of the Feynman technique and the Socratic method of learning. As a student, even if you prefer to study by yourself (like I used to do when I was a student), it is helpful every now and then to gather a few colleagues and see if you can teach them what you have just learned. This will allow you to identify your knowledge gaps as well as what you know well, thus fostering your ability to improve yourself in your learning.
The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask which he finds it hard to answer.
