Never forget the WHY behind what you’re teaching.
Challenging teachers to think about WHY they are teaching or assigning something will get them to stop rote teaching and start teaching for real learning.
My favourite story to tell about this is the one about the little boy who asks his mom one Christmas, “Mom, why do you cut the ends off the turkey before you put it in the oven?”
The mom, pausing for a moment to think before she slides the raw bird into the hot oven, replies, “I don’t know, your Gran did it and so I do it.”
Not satisfied with this answer, the little boy gets his chance to ask his grandmother that evening when she arrives at their house. “Gran, why did you cut the two ends off the turkey?”
His grandmother, also pauses for a moment, shrugs and says it’s because her mother did it.
A little while later, the little boy’s Great Grandmother arrives for dinner and he asks her the same question.
“It’s because my oven was too small.”
The little boy’s mom never cut the ends off the turkey again.
The WHY is often forgotten, but when we come back to it, we have more freedom to make our own decisions and take responsibility for our tasks.
