How to Achieve the Best Educational Results

TLDR:
The best results demand aligned excellence: highly organized curriculum, teachers who love the subject and kids, hard-working students with growth mindsets, and loving, supportive parents, all combined to cultivate the whole child.

What elements must be combined to achieve the best educational results? We must first consider what it is we’re learning, and the sequence in which we introduce ideas and experiences to elicit the desired outcome. This is curriculum. We must consider next the delivery of that curriculum, and so we consider the teacher. And to whom will this teacher be teaching this curriculum? Why the student, of course, the prime consideration. Then where there are students there are the parents who bore them, so they must naturally be included as well.

So, what makes curriculum good and what makes curriculum bad? The philosophical ideal is to simultaneously cultivate the good and eliminate any bad. For instance, is it better for students to be disengaged or engaged? Engaged, obviously, so the curriculum should be engaging. Students should be prompted to follow along in class by writing, by drawing pictures, and by showing their work while solving problems. They should be mentally and physically (even the act of writing is physical!) stimulated. No child wants to sit and listen motionlessly to another human speak for an hour. They want to be involved, and they become wonderfully active when given many little tasks to complete along the way.

This leads us to the next question: Is it better to give a child 100 pages of raw text to read, or 100 pages broken into 10, tightly organized, 10-page chapters? Naturally, the smaller pieces are more manageable, more satisfying for the child completing 10 tasks vs. 1, and many smaller pieces are more approachable than one huge chunk. Even the most complex ideas can be explained to a child if broken into small enough pieces and organized well enough. So, the best curriculum would break its ideas down to the smallest possible pieces, helping students smoothly digest the whole, complex concept. To sharpen the point still further: Even if a particularly gifted student could sit and grind through all 100 pages raw in a single sitting, the experience would still feel better if those 100 pages were chunked into 10-page chapters and formatted nicely.

Now, speaking of gifted students, what of rigor? Of difficulty? The ideas we give students can be surprisingly complex so long as they’re broken down and organized well enough. With that said, however, the actual work itself can’t be too difficult or too easy, lest the child feel overwhelmed and give up or bored and quit. There’s a sweet spot, and the only way to truly find it is for the children to reveal it to you. The best curriculum, therefore, is tailored to the children as it’s created. The creator should be tightly attuned to their students, feel when the children are moving at the right pace, add to what’s too slow, and spread out what’s too fast. If that ideal workload can be maintained, that sweet spot, then students consistently feel satisfied as they put in work and earn epiphanies. Challenged but not overwhelmed, hard work within capability, this is the balance. We must first give them sound fundamentals, then we can ask them to apply those fundamentals to solve problems, to create, and to expand still further. We cannot ask them to do anything they haven’t been adequately prepared for – no skipping steps, no assumptions that they already know something. We go from A to Z, no missing letters, no jumps.

The best curriculum keeps students engaged, breaks everything down, and moves at the right pace.

So, who will deliver this excellent curriculum? The best teacher is one who loves their subject matter and who loves kids in general. If a teacher loves their subject, they will have studied and explored it thoroughly and excitedly, and none of it will have felt like work. Doing what we love doesn’t feel like work, it feels like play. Love of the game takes such a teacher up and down all the paths and in and out all the secret passages, making them a worthy guide indeed for wide-eyed new students. Such a teacher would be excited to field questions from students because perhaps the child can ask a new question, something novel and exciting to explore in an old and beloved field. Or perhaps the teacher gets to deliver a well-polished fundamental to produce a glorious epiphany in a young mind. A teacher’s sincere passion is immediately recognized and naturally spreads to the children. The feeling is contagious, and feelings are important. Especially in the children.

As such, if a teacher loves kids, bonds inevitably form between that teacher and their students. Such a teacher would naturally treat students with respect and with care from a sincere desire for each child’s best interest. In turn, those students would feel seen, accepted, and free to be who they truly are – feelings which open the mind to discover exotic new ideas and which warm the heart to the joy of learning. Then the children begin to explore more boldly from the safety of such an environment. They begin to see how everything fits together, and in so seeing, where they too fit into the bigger picture. The best teacher is an experienced guide through the unfamiliar, a facilitator of the natural learning experience. And if you equip such a teacher who loves their subject and who loves kids with the very best curriculum, you can make absolute magic in that classroom. You can achieve things beyond what others may think possible. And both teacher and student alike can have a whole lot of fun along the way too. When everyone is learning and happy and themselves, whole-class inside jokes and much laughter soon infuse the curriculum with a child’s playfulness.

It is the teacher that breathes life into the curriculum and creates this beautiful experience for the student. And for themselves. Therefore, the school’s culture and administration should serve to faithfully empower the teacher toward this end, for they are the tip of the spear.

So, the best curriculum and a teacher that loves the subject and the kids. Now, what about the student? What’s the ideal student like? When we cut through the illusions, we are left with but two qualities in an ideal student: work ethic and a growth mindset. Given only these two elements, everything else can be derived in time. But if there is laziness where work should be, or a stubbornness fighting against growth, any other positive qualities would quickly be lessened. Fortunately for every human being who lives, has lived, or ever will: these qualities are ultimately choices. We choose to work hard, or not, and we can always choose our perspective. And if we’re off course, we can choose to do better today, right now. Hard work and perpetual improvement are an unstoppable combination. The student’s hard work earns them a commensurate increase in power, in awareness, and in newfound capability and potential. When working hard we see our strengths and grow confident, and when tested, we see our shortcomings and where we can improve. Then, if we seize this golden opportunity to make something more of ourselves, we grow. We can become greater. Then we apply our newly-acquired skills continue working hard, improving, working hard, and improving, ad infinitum. Or until all our dreams have come true.

Thus, if the curriculum is the best, and the teacher is the best, all that’s left is for the student to put in the work. Their growth mindset keeps them coachable and accelerates growth thereby, and everything compounds over time. Now, if a third quality were to be named, it would certainly be discipline, because it ties the first two together and amplifies them both. Discipline begets consistency, and consistent hard work produces consistent growth, which rapidly snowballs into the magnificent. No one can buy qualities such as work ethic, positive attitude, or discipline, nor can they be given from one to another, they are choices we make every, single, day. If a student consistently shows up with a positive attitude, ready to work hard, learn, and grow, what more can be asked? What more is in anyone’s power?

This of course begs the next question: How does such a student come to be? And the answer of course is: The parents. Ok, so, how? What sets of conditions produce the ideal student? The same as produce the ideal person. If we begin with the physical, the child should get plenty of sleep each night, they should be being cultivated athletically, they should have excellent nutrition, their body should be clean, and their physical environment beautiful. As regards the mind, the student’s curiosity should be cultivated constantly from birth. Parents would be wise to take the time to answer the child’s questions as they explore whenever possible, and with today’s technology ever in-hand, it’s basically always possible. It’s also worth noting here that we are speaking of ideals, and that ideals can’t always be achieved 100% of the time – but it is always the ideal toward which we must strive, nothing lesser. If we come up short on occasion after maximum effort, such is life, but we strove toward something noble, and there is both consolation and emboldenment in this.

So, body and mind, what about heart and soul? While the body’s needs are effectively logistics, and the mind is essentially explaining countless simple things to the innocently ignorant, the heart boils

down to two qualities: support and encouragement. If the child wishes to speak, we should listen. If the child attempts something challenging or new, something beyond their comfort zone (where growth occurs), we should build them up and fill them with courage. We should do what we can to help. We cannot run the race for them, but we can cheer like hell from the sidelines and be there at the finish with a smile and a bottle of water. When they succeed, they should be celebrated. If they fail, they should be shown that their worth is intrinsic, not merit-based. To the child striving in the arena, this is more precious than gold.

On a curious note, music is another excellent means of cultivating the heart. It opens within the child another dimension from which to experience the human condition. Melodies express feelings without words, perhaps all the more purely so. An awareness and understanding of these realms adds depth to a child, and upon a degree of proficiency (which too comes from work and growth!), becomes a positive emotional outlet for the child. Perhaps even a means of self-expression.

And thus, we arrive at the root of it all, the soul of the child, the self. Who and what they truly are at their core. One of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is self-knowledge, helping the child recognize themselves and their gifts. Because once we understand who we are and discover our gifts, what we are meant to do in this world grows clear. And then, we have a precious opportunity to live a fantastic life. We can look our destiny in the eye, well-equipped to fulfill our deepest potential.

Isn’t this the goal of education? To help draw out all the potential within a human being? Thus, the whole person must be cultivated to achieve the greatest educational outcome. Like the curriculum used to develop the mind in academia, the most successful athletic teams too have their own curriculum, their own athletic development program. Good music teachers too have curriculum through which they lead their pupils. And the culture and habits of the home where the child is raised have a tremendous effect on development, a sort of personal curriculum established for the child by the parents.

Curriculum, teacher, student, and parent… These pieces all in alignment produce the greatest educational result: a child who understands the worlds around and within them, and who has been empowered to create something beautiful in this world.