Teaching Tip #100

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #100

My dream assignment #3 - use Sally Hogshead’s How the World Sees You to determine your students strengths and weaknesses.  THEN match them up with a teacher who is weak in those areas.  Allow both to learn form each other.

Sally Hogshead has a website that focuses on how the world sees you.  What that means is by taking a short personality test, her website will come up with a profile of how others see you - and more importantly - she will highlight your strengths and your major weakness.  The point here is that she shows you what instances put you at an advantage.  In my case, my major strength is “the prestige,” which means I’m not a rule follower as much as I am one who seeks unconventional solutions to problems.  So environments that challenge me yet give me the freedom to ad lib and create are ones that will make me the best version of myself.

Now, on the other hand, my weakness is “reliability.”  Since I’m spontaneous and dislike rules, I am not the one you’d want to count on to do the same thing every single day by the book.  Because that is not in my strengths, if I’m in a job or a task that requires that, I’m not going to be very successful.

Those revelations alone are reason enough to take her test.  But what I would love to see happen is if somehow teachers could be paired up with a student as a “reverse mentor” whose strength is our greatest weakness.

So for me, I’d be paired up with a student whose biggest strength is “reliability.”  They could hold me accountable for all the little rules I carelessly disregard.  They could remind me of all the little things I neglect in the name of trying to do something a little differently.

Think of all that I could learn from them.  Plus, think of the great opportunity the student and teacher would have to learn from each other and work together.

Just wondering, but I think learning and working together are real world skills that companies are in dire need of, right?

And that isn’t even taking into account all that teachers will learn from the “reverse mentors.”  Any teacher knows this to be true - if you really want to learn something, teach it to someone else.

I mean that’s how I finally had to learn grammar (thank you Mrs. Semanko for making me teaching a week or two of your College Prep Composition class all the way back in the fall of 1997).  So what would our students learn when they were called upon to teach us skills that we either lack or struggle with?