I’ve just started reading The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. His introduction struck me as exactly what I would like to write for the book I’d like to write on how to improve your teaching practice by embedding literacy and numeracy.
So I’ve cannibalised it. Here’s my version and the introduction to my mythical book below. Tell me what you think in the comments… Would you read such a book if I wrote the rest of it?
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Since you’re reading this blog post, chances are that you want to make some change to your teaching or training practice: understanding the demands of your training in more depth, know your learners better, teach better, hack your subject, increase your productivity, flip your classroom, or feel more creative in your work.
What you need to do is look at ways of improving your teaching practice. One great way of hacking your teaching is to embed literacy and numeracy. However, it’s likely that a few things are holding you back from doing any of this:
- Teaching anxiety: The feeling that you “don’t really know much about teaching, let alone literacy and numeracy” and therefore could never implement new or different teaching approaches, or do more work due to all the other pressures in your life. Better to maintain the status quo than fear the unknown.
- Certification intimidation: The idea that “embedding literacy and numeracy is really complicated” and is a subject best left to highly trained “experts.” If you don’t have advanced qualifications in education, adult teaching, or literacy and numeracy, who are you to say you know what to do?
- Imposter syndrome: The fear that you’re already “in over your head” in this teaching game and it’s only a matter of time before you’re unmasked as a total fraud of a trainer. For goodness sake, your background is in industry or business… No one likes a phoney tutor or trainer, right?
Here’s the good news: everyone in education has these unfounded fears, and they can be eliminated quickly. All you have to do is learn a few simple concepts and approaches that will change the way you think about your teaching and training.
If you’re someone with a background in trades, industry, or business AND you work in education in some way, this book is for you. This might mean that you teach your trade or vocational content in a traditional training environment, or you might work in a business or other organisation where training, coaching, or some form of education is integral to the products you sell or the services you provide.
No matter if you are new to teaching, an old hand, an instructional designer, content creator, or other person who knows they need to teach, train, or coach to do their work, you’re about to discover a useful new way of looking at your teaching that will help you spend less time fighting your fears and more time doing things that make a difference to your learners and customers.