The Sweet Spot of Teaching & Learning

It took me years before I found my sweet spot as a shooter. That one area on the basketball court where I felt most confident as a scorer. To this day, my sweet spot is on the right wing, just inside the three-point line.

But to find it required a ridiculous amount of practice and years of experimentation. I remember one year I tried to convince myself that I was going to be a solid baseline shooter like Reggie Miller, but it never felt right. That was his sweet spot on the court, it wasn’t mine.

As a teacher and learner in the classroom, I am only now beginning to find my sweet spot. After ten years of trial and error, wasting way too much time lecturing in the beginning—shooting layups—I’m finally starting to find that point where deep learning happens.

Here the elements that must exist for me to find my sweet spot as a teacher & learner:

1. PURPOSE. It starts with a clear and authentic purpose for learning. It has to. If any of us—the students, or me as the teacher—are going to care, we need to share the same WHY.
2. PRODUCT. What we decide to create at the end must exist in the real world. It can be a movie, a book, a commercial, anything. As long as the students have professional influences they can refer to and even emulate, it doesn’t matter what the final product is, just that it exists. The fine balance here is making sure the project isn’t too easy or too arduous.
3. ITERATIONS. The steps along the way are critical. And they must connect to the overall purpose and guide students to the final product. These steps can be mini-deadlines, rough drafts, iterations, etc.
4. CONTROL. This has taken me the longest to learn. As the teacher, I shouldn’t guide everything. It’s tempting to take control, because it minimizes student failure and maximizes efficiency. But it starves students from the important struggle that leads to deeper learning. Students must be given time independently to explore, to have fun, to become frustrated, and to figure things out on their own. Only when it’s appropriate and necessary should I step in to scaffold and offer feedback.
5. PRESENTATION. I used to lose sleep as a teenager in anticipation for each basketball game. I loved performing. This has to be the case with learning as well. When we did our TED Talks this year, or showed off videos we produced to our community, or presented stock portfolios to the client, students couldn’t wait to unveil the final product.

I’ll end by extending the metaphor just a bit longer.

Finding my spot as a shooter did not guarantee success. In all my years as a basketball player, I never came close to making 100% of my shots. I had to constantly adjust my form, my release, and my timing. But that perfect degree of challenge drove me to practice more and more and more. Making every shot would have bored me to apathy; missing every shot would have forced me to quit entirely.

Learning is no different, and it challenges me on a daily basis as a teacher. But I have found my sweet spot; now it’s time to experiment, iterate, reflect and even fail from time to time. After all, nobody shoots 100% from the field.