🧑🏫 Are Teachers Obsolete?
When all the information is available at the click of a button, are teachers obsolete?
The short answer is NO.
However, as knowledge and information has evolved, the role our teachers play needs to change as well. Let's take an example...
Last week, we at NextLeap wrapped up our first cohort of the People Leaders' Fellowship. The program had managers and start-up founders from various domains - engineering, product and design from some of the biggest companies in India
While designing the program, two questions were on our mind:
How do we help fellows to reflect on their own experiences?
How do we get fellows to learn from each other?
This program, unlike any other we designed, was designed for people who had a wealth of experience. We felt they needed a structure to collate that more than they needed to learn from instructors.
What did we do differently? We enabled 2 Peer-led learning experiences:
Sandbox 🏖️
Sounding Board👂
Sandbox 🏖️
Sandbox was a space for learners to reflect and build on their experiences. Each week, the Sandbox was based on a specific topic:
Week 1: Managing Yourself
Week 2: Delegation & Managing Up
Week 3: The Art of Feedback & Coaching
Week 4: Nurturing Culture
What did we do?
In breakout rooms, learners would discuss & debate a situation or a theme. Borrowing from their individual experiences, they would arrive at a point of view and share with the larger group.
What happened?
Sandbox became safe spaces to be vulnerable, to fail - a luxury not many managers get in the real world.
It also helped build a sense of community and helped the group leverage each other's strengths and experiences unlike any instructor-led sessions.
Sounding Boards👂
Sounding Boards were spaces for learners to bounce of ideas on emerging topics:
Managing Remote Teams
Hiring Challenges
Managing Gen-Z Talent
Topics that everyone was struggling with and no one really had answers to.
What did we do?
We gave the control back to the learner. We let them choose the specific problem they were struggling with the most.
Once we had these peer-led discussions, we invited instructors to share how they were tackling similar problems.
What happened?
Sounding Boards became spaces to bounce ideas and create knowledge with peers. Instructors helped in solidifying their learnings and look at things from a fresh perspective.
By taking a peer-first approach to learning, the People Leaders' Fellowship became the first program at NextLeap without any 'instructors' teaching topics.
Instead of sharing knowledge, experts during the fellowship focussed on:
Consolidating the peer discussion in smaller groups
Sharing their first hand experience & their learnings
Helping arrive at tactical ways to solve a problem
In a nutshell, teachers need to evolve from being
a sage on stage TO a guide on the side
Sandbox and Sounding Boards are just 2 ways in which this can happen.
With this program we tried to push the boundaries of learning experience. The learnings are going to help us iterate the next cohort of the People Leaders’ Fellowship, and other future programs.
We’ve unlocked a whole new world of peer learning and we feel this is just the tip of the iceberg - there is so much more to come!
This article was originally published on the NextLeap blog and later featured on Offbeat’s 91st Issue