Learning 101

Wendy Kopp

Founder and president
Teach for America
New York, New York

The best advantage that a learner can have is a good teacher. And what sets the best teachers apart from the rest? The best teachers drive themselves to be continuous learners: They never shut themselves off from the chance to learn more in order to become even better teachers.

I've seen that point demonstrated again and again. For example, four years ago, Gaston Middle School, in rural North Carolina, was listed in the bottom quartile in the state's performance ratings. A member of the Teach for America corps in that school, a seventh-grade English teacher, told me that less than 40% of her kids passed the state's writing test during her first two years in Gaston. Rather than lowering her expectations, she decided to raise them -- to demand more of student writing.

But to get students to work harder and to raise their own expectations, she first had to be open to learning more and to trying new things herself. She had to become more goal-oriented. She had to ask herself constantly, "How do I get these kids to where they need to be?"

To convince students that, regardless of where they were born, they could achieve great heights through hard work, she had to gain their trust. So she visited with students and their families after school, and she took students on trips in order to expand their vision of what their lives could be. She took on a role that went far beyond the traditional role of a teacher.

And when she realized that the school day wasn't long enough for her to reach her goals, she and other corps teachers convinced the principal to extend the school day by one 45-minute class period. Soon students were staying until 7 PM and were coming in on Saturday mornings as well. In her third year at Gaston, 96% of her students passed the state's writing test, and Gaston Middle School went from being in the bottom quartile to scoring in the top quartile of all North Carolina schools.

Wendy Kopp (wendy@teachforamerica.org) founded Teach for America after graduating from college in 1989. The program, which grew out of an idea that Kopp developed in her senior thesis, is a national corps of recent college graduates who each commit two years to teaching in an urban or rural public school. Since its founding, TFA has placed about 5,000 teachers in schools whose locations range from the South Bronx to South Central Los Angeles.

Richard Olivier

Visiting fellow
Cranfield School of Management
Theater director
Globe Theatre
London, England

Logic and analytical abilities alone can no longer guarantee success, because the rapid pace of change makes long-term projections unreliable. So people have to be more imaginative and more flexible than ever before -- and ways of learning need to become more creative as well. That's where arts-based learning comes in.

Shakespeare has great lessons for managers who must lead amid continuous change. His histories and tragedies -- case studies of leadership -- contain not only insightful detail but also a kind of underlying mythical element that makes them particularly memorable.

Take Henry V, one of the best examples in literature of a leader's journey through a great project -- all in five acts. The narrative gets you inside the characters, so that you learn not only what people think of various leaders but also what those leaders think of themselves.

In Act I, Henry V defines a vision of where he wants to go, he gets people to accept that vision, and he negotiates a way to achieve it. In Act III, he goes into battle and encounters obstacles while still having to keep his troops motivated. Then he hits an even bigger stumbling block on the field of Agincourt, where he finds himself surrounded by an army much larger than his own. Act IV examines how Henry V deals with that challenge.

Stories give us an imaginative reference point. They enable us to learn the lessons of leadership in a deep and memorable way -- and, ultimately, they help us to define and to rehearse a vision of the kind of leader that we want ourselves to be.

Richard Olivier (richardolivier@btinternet.com) is a theater director and creative consultant. His learning model, called "mythodrama," incorporates organizational-development and theatrical techniques, experiential exercises, and Shakespearean drama. He is the son of Joan Plowright and the late Sir Laurence Olivier.