when gia my name is Lee Shulman I'm a professor at Stanford University and I was president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of teaching in the United States and I have the pleasure of visiting this lovely institution for the preparation of the next generation of leaders in Business and Finance in Brazil and I've been asked to comment briefly on a simple question which has a very complicated answer and that is what are the major impediments what are the major difficulties the major challenges to excellent teaching in universities for the purpose of preparing creative intelligent
responsible problem solvers the first one does not come from universities I have a very good friend who is the principal of a high school in New York City and she has a sign on her office wall that is also my philosophy of teaching and learning her sign says this when you really understand education you realize that teaching is mainly a matter of listening learning requires talking and in this saying she identifies the first most important challenge to teaching in the university and that is that university professors believe that they were hired to talk when in
fact if they really understand teaching they recognize that their first responsibility is to learn to listen to students to listen to them carefully respectfully stimulating them to offer their ideas so that the professor but more important other students can build on their ideas correct them and rich them and help them grow and therefore the students have an equal responsibility with the teachers the students must take the responsibility of speaking their ideas of talking of expressing themselves if the students sit passively and never offer their ideas if they never take the risk of putting their ideas
out in public then the teachers cannot do their job and education ultimately fails because there is no creative thinking without a certain amount of courage in which you present ideas even if you are not certain that they're correct so my first principle is that teaching is about listening and learning is about speaking this makes teaching much more difficult because if you never let the students speak you can say anything you want and as a teacher you never have to change your plans but as soon as you invite students to speak they change the order of
the teaching they introduce new ideas new surprises to the teacher and it requires the teacher to be much more flexible much more strategic and much more willing to follow the thought of the students wherever it might lead the second principle I would offer for why creative problem-solving does not occur let me tell you a story I was sitting one evening at dinner with the Deputy Minister of Education from the People's Republic of China and she asked me the following question she asked why is it that the Chinese students always score very near the top on
international tests of academic achievement but they do not creatively produce new ideas and new projects and new products that compete in the world of enterprise they do well on tests they are wonderful students but not good creative problem-solvers and I said to her because in order to learn to be a creative problem solver you have to learn to make mistakes you have to learn to make errors because only if you make mistakes can you learn from your mistakes can you have the courage to take risks and try out new ideas and that is the path
to creativity and she said but our teachers don't want our students to make mistakes our teachers want our students to have perfect tests and perfect answers and I responded if that is the case then they will always be the best students but the poorest creative problem-solvers the lesson here is the lesson that error is not only permitted but errors are desirable if we create an atmosphere of learning from our mistakes and correcting them there is a book about surgery and about how people learn to do surgery and the title of the book is forgive and
remember there is a saying in English forgive and forget that if you do something bad to me I will forgive you and forget that you ever did it but in learning and learning of surgery or business or of teaching the motto must be forgive and remember you make a mistake but you only are forgiven if you remember your mistake and from it and I think that is the second principle of learning to be creative learning to use mistakes productively instead of hiding them there are many other things I could say but I think this might
be just enough for one small video clip so thank you for your attention
