Quote of the Week...from Benjamin Franklin

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.  ----Benjamin Franklin

When I read the above quote from one of our country's great founding figures, who also happened to be an important scientist, inventor, and diplomat, I get stuck on the second sentence, "Teach me and I remember".  For to me, teaching and learning pair up precisely together...I think I might have chosen a different set of words to describe what I believe ol' Ben was trying to express here...

Just telling someone something, as is much the case inside a traditional classroom with a teacher up front delivering the lesson to the assembled students, does not ensure that those students will even remember anything, much less learn the lesson.  So that takes care of sentence #1 in the quote.  In order to get the students to remember, the teacher imposes feedback on them, either in the form of homework or by asking questions in class.  So instead of how Mr. Franklin worded it, I would say, "Demand feedback and I remember."  And that goes well beyond formal education...if you want to assure yourself that someone has understood what you have just told them, get them to repeat it back to you.  And now we come to the last part of the quote.  Steven Covey, in the early pages of his blockbuster book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, stated that a surefire way to learn and retain something is to quickly turn around and teach it to someone else.  This comes under the meaning of the term "involve me", which might also be better expressed by saying "get me to apply it".  I would also stress that the more intricately and deeply one can weave the lessons learned into the tapestry of his or her ongoing life, the stronger they will endure.  And finally, to all of this I'd like to add that the goal of learning and education is not, as self-help guru Anthony Robbins once put it, simply cognitive understanding, but rather unconscious competence.  Get to know something so well to the point where it comes so naturally that it seems to have always been a part of you...