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