Lay a brick path for your students
Leave gaps
When you are first given a student, you will want to establish some basic terms and a framework for your teaching. It is easy to believe that this foundation can be laid thoroughly.
It can’t. And indeed, you should make it a point to leave pieces out.
Why? First, it is a teacher trap to attempt to be thorough when laying this foundation, and you can waste student attention — and teacher resources — in the effort. It is better to accept and intend that it be laid imperfectly and incompletely.
Next, no matter how solid your understanding of what you are teaching, you are still learning, and any foundation you lay will necessarily shift as you have insights. Leave room for those insights.
Another reason is this: teaching the fundamentals without including a vision of the destination isolates the fundamentals and distances the student from the purpose of the fundaments. Somewhere in the process of introducing a subject and laying the foundation you should seek to inspire the student to the destination.
Others have said this more elegantly. Instead of a path, Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes of a ship:
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
If you want your students to walk a path, teach them to yearn for a goal or destination. Then point the way. When needed, place another brick on their path. The moment they stop moving forward, point again at a destination. There are many destinations. Simply pick one that inspires. It need not be the same one as yesterday.
Continue to leave empty space your foundation’s path. An inspired student will ask for the brick they want, and you will have wisely left empty space in which to place it.
Your quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery is so very inspiring that I’m taking it into my work in non-profit fundraising, as it applies there as much as in the Teaching environment.
People will contribute, whether to their own learning or to some cause outside of themselves, if doing so fulfills some longing. While desire fulfillment in and of itself can burn out of control, suppression of it denies the fact that we are creatures of desire, longing for a return to some point of connection. The work then is to help the student learn to properly identify healthy hungers.
By having created a foundation, the small spaces left open in the path can then be opportunities for empowering the student to ask for what they need next.
As humans, desire is always with us. As teachers, we can waste effort to try to put out the fire of this passion, because the coals are always hot, even when successfully buried under ash. More advantageous, as you say, is to direct the passion to burn where the heat and light are most useful for the student’s learning.
Fire is a good analogy, and in some ways better than the brick-laid path, because as teachers we never have complete control over the direction of the student’s learning and a brick path implies such control. Fire is more apt — we set the fuel where we think best, and coax the student’s passion to burn along that path. But we do not control fire. We can create a place for it to burn. We can offer it fuel. We can even blow air and offer shelter to compete with the wind and the rain. But the fire belongs to the student.
[...] A shorter timeframe means you must forgo a careful and thorough approach to the subject and instead seek to offer a faster spark that may stay with the student, and perhaps inspire them over time. A shorter timeframe is a great opportunity to see how minimally you can Lay a Foundation and still teach to a path. To improve your ability to teach to shorter timeframes, look for opportunities. If you have a venue in which to teach, offer to teach very short timeframes and see what you can offer in a few minutes, or in an hour, that you are sure should take longer. Challenge yourself in this way, and you may find that your longer teachings benefit. [...]
[...] This is a common teacher’s dilemma: start with a simpler work and build so there is a strong base, or guide the student through an advanced work that will almost certainly be beyond their ability? So much depends on the study and on the student. There are studies in which the advanced work is impossible or dangerous, such as mountain climbing. In the case of music or literature, the danger is more about discouraging or losing the student. The advantage, as Reineke says, of offering the more “serious” works to start, is that these works are often where the student becomes inspired to want more graceful and sophisticated material. If you can then show the student how the basics relate to this, you may have gained the student’s enthusiasm for laying the foundation, and they will learn faster and deeper. [...]
[...] You may find these relevant: Laying a Foundation, Questions and Answers. [...]