Our Teaching Approach: “Why Should I Learn This?”
I was thinking about one of the most common questions that I hear educators and learners talking about today:
Student:
“I'm not going to be a mathematician/scientist/writer…
Why do I need to learn this?"
This question is so simple to answer but the most common response I hear from teachers has been:
Teacher:
“…[internal panic!!!]...”
And it got us thinking…
This question is SO easy to answer.
WHY does it leave so many at a loss for how to respond?
We believe the reason why this unproductive conversation happens so frequently between students and teachers is because this line of questioning and answering comes from a fundamental and common misunderstanding about the purpose of education.
Education is NOT meant to fill a person's head with facts; it is meant to teach them how to be curious and how to think for themselves.
Want to understand this a bit more? Let’s dive into how learning works!
How We Teach:
At Unbounded Academics, we work extremely hard to provide a highly tailored program for each student with whom we work, based on their unique strengths, challenges, and goals. We are able to create such individually cut programs because we have decades of teaching experience working with an incredibly diverse range of students, spanning the breadth of goal ranges and academic backgrounds.
Our customized teaching approaches have a common core within them, though, based on two of the most fundamental needs of students and of human beings as they learn.
1) We teach critical-thinking as a life-skill
Critical thinking is the ability to analyze any challenge set before you that is not obviously or immediately solve-able by:
breaking the challenge down into its constituent parts in order to…
resolve each component individually, step-by-step, to eventually…
build a solution!
While human beings are better problem-solvers than most of the animal kingdom, NONE of us are born knowing how to “find the limits of a function” or how to “build an analytical essay”! These outcomes are products that can only ever be built through learning how to recognize the commonalities that all problems share by being exposed to them…
OVER…
…and OVER…
AND OVER…
AGAIN!
We teach students how to recognize the separate pieces within multi-part systems and problems in order to break them down into manageable parts that can each then be separately-- and much more simply!-- addressed and resolved, finally bringing each solution together to solve the problem as a whole.
We teach critical thinking as a crucial pathway to improvement in academics and on standardized tests.
But, more importantly, we teach critical thinking to our students as a life-skill which will help them problem solve wherever and whenever they find themselves in order to improve their own lives, transcending by far their exam and school experiences.
2) We teach subject-content knowledge
to expand on these critical thinking skills
Remember that student’s earlier question?
"I'm not going to be a mathematician/scientist/writer; why do I need to learn this?"
Because human beings mostly learn through repetition and the pattern recognition that develops from those repeated cycles, we need to actually learn how to critically think about complex situations AGAIN and AGAIN in order to get better at learning how to think about complex situations.
Maybe one student will never be a theoretical physicist, but pursuing that career path is not the point of this student taking a physics class in high school!
If they can learn how to tear apart complicated force, mass, and acceleration problems then they will get better at analyzing ALL multi-part challenges that they will face.
Taking on challenging subject matter will make them a more thoughtful human being who is better at understanding the world around them as a whole.
These are the two of the greatest reasons why we teach; to help people learn how to understand and analyze the world around them. In doing so, we build a more thoughtful and passionate global community.
