How to rethink education in Pakistan

[Music]

assalamualaikum everyone

this is your ninth grade physics class

and pretend that you’re all ninth

graders

and i am your physics teacher

there are a few rules to the class that

i would like to mention up front

number one you’re not allowed to ask

any questions there are too many of you

anyway

and if you do choose to ask a question i

will hold that

against you for the rest of the year

number two i will soon

pick one or two of you to be my

favorites

and then for the rest of the year most

of you do not exist for me

and number three in terms of how i

teach i will come into the classroom

i will start writing on the board you

will see my back for most of the class

anyway

and please do not

try to understand what i write on the

board

please do not process

do not try to make sense of how it

connects to the real world

ladies and gentlemen welcome

to the classroom that millions of

students across pakistan

experience every single day

i used to head the investment promotion

agency of the government of punjab

and in that capacity i would meet ceos

from across the country

and there was one thing that almost

everyone

would consistently say

almost everyone that it’s hard to find

good talent in the country

and so you know with a country of over

220 million people with a very young

demographic

it’s it’s it’s sort of shocking

surprising

as to why is there such a lack of good

talent and so

you know that set me on a journey that

i’ve been on

ever since really trying to understand

what’s the root cause

and now that i engage with students

every single day every week

i am starting to believe with increasing

conviction

that the root cause lies in the kind of

classroom

that i started out today’s session with

so how do we transform these classrooms

not improve not marginally improve

transform how do you transform these

classrooms

you know when you’re a teacher

what business are you in what what’s

your real

jd when you’re a teacher what do you

actually do

when you’re a teacher you’re in the

business

of selling ideas

concepts often abstract ones complex

ones

but what you do is you sell ideas

now imagine imagine what will happen

if we were to start training our

teachers

to think and behave

like sales people you all know

salespeople

this is not a play on words it’s a shift

in

mindset a powerful shift and mindset

if our teachers were trained to think

and behave like sales people

whose job was to get client by

in student buy-in on the ideas

and concepts that they were selling

i’m sure all of you know mickey mouse

right if you know mickey mouse you know

disney

disney is one of the most powerful one

of the most

loved brands in the world

and do you know what disney calls its

employees

it calls them cast members

and the reason it calls them cast

members is because when they

are at work they are

expected to behave as if they are

in a show perpetually right

now that’s the power of putting people

in that right

mindset you know that’s how one of the

most powerful brands in the world

among other things has been successful

in executing its strategy so imagine

that we do manage to train

our teachers to start thinking and

behaving like salespeople

what’s going to happen three things

are going to happen three things number

one

a good salesperson makes his products

simple and interesting right

as a good salesperson makes his products

exciting

for the students for the clients

a good salesperson if he cannot sell the

first time

tries to sell the product again

a good salesperson encourages his

clients

to ask questions so what happens

the first thing that starts to happen is

the level of teaching starts

to go up you start to automatically

induce good teaching better teaching

in classrooms number two

you know whenever i uh buy a new book

one of the first things i do is i try to

take the price label off

it irritates me a price label on the

back of a book

and very often i find that labels

are hard to take off labels can be

sticky

we unfortunately as parents

as teachers consistently put

negative labels on our students

consistently

you’re a loser you could not get into

pre-medical fsc

you don’t deserve it your career is

destroyed forever

you have no hope consistently we do that

and what happens is and i’m starting to

realize this more and more as i interact

with students from across the country

is those labels become

permanent identities of these students

students start to internalize those

labels

now what does a good salesperson do a

certain good salesperson

does not put negative labels on her

clients

i mean imagine walking into a prada

store and the salesperson telling you

you don’t deserve that shoe

she’s not going to say that to you right

a good salesperson

encourages her clients

our students trust me on this because

this is

a hypothesis that’s being confirmed

with such a level of confidence

that our students are dying for a single

word of encouragement from

anybody close to them so the second

thing that starts to happen

is that the teachers through the mindset

of a salesperson

starts to encourage students

and then there is a third thing that

happens

you know every year

migratory birds travel

fly from the north to the south

covering thousands of miles

there is one thing that these migratory

birds have

that millions of students across

pakistan don’t

one thing a sense

of direction

it’s amazing i mean i get tons of

messages where

students say i’ve done a master’s in

this

i’ve done an mfil in this and i don’t

know what to do with my degree now

so you have students who have

traveled across their academic journey

elementary school

middle school metric intermediate

university

and at the end of the journey they’re

hit with this

existential question of what do i do

with my degree now

but what does a good salesperson do what

does a good salesperson do

good sales people if you have interacted

with them

will give you directions you use this

product this is where this goes you take

up this path

this is where this goes so our students

who have been on this academic journey

sometimes without a single serious

session on where they’re headed and why

desperately need directions

directions so to me interestingly enough

what i am

very convinced of and it so happens that

the solution

lies right here on the stage the magic

to transforming classrooms

is really in these three alphabets

t teaching better teaching e

encouragement and d

for direction that’s really it

and those are the three core things that

start to happen

when we manage to

transform the mindsets of our teachers

it’s not going to happen through some

training program

it’s not going to happen if we go in

trying to make some marginal

improvements

it’s only going to happen when we

fundamentally

transform our teachers mindsets

and make them push them

train them to start thinking and

behaving

like salespeople thank you