Dear friend,

as you may know, my daily job is trainer coach for Philips Heathcare. I am giving lessons and traveling around world to deliver a training for Hospital Informatics. That means I teach about products, which do handle medical images. Very often I gave lessons about calibration, networking, image quality and similar topics.

It is very interesting work and I love teaching in general. I did a lot of teaching earlier when I worked as assistant professor on a university back in Czechoslovakia.

Why I am writing you about it? Well I am planning to open those coach sessions for photographers and that brought my interest to the topic how to improve a teaching.

At my work, in recent past, we had use a lot of virtual and remote trainings, while also creating some e-learning. Frankly, I always preferred live teaching, in front of a live people.

I am reading (almost done) book from Ken Robinson “The Element”. In this book Mr. Robinson describe possibility for each human to find its Element. By Element Ken Robinson means the single thing which one loves and is best in. He believe that every person has such a Element and when he/she finds it he can get incredible results and satisfaction.

You know that feeling, when you doing something. It goes so well and you know this is it, this is the thing you like to do all the time. You are very excited and everything goes easy and results are great and you feel happy. Well if you ever had it than, you had found your element in the task you were doing.

Myself, as everybody else, would love to work like that. Do only things, which brings that perfect satisfaction and certainly, when it goes so easy. I was searching, thinking and remembering what was I doing in past when I had that feeling. You certainly remember those feelings as well. There is a quite a difference between remembering that feelings and to remember and to recognize what exactly was it what brought it to you. So it was not easy for me and frankly, I am still not completely sure.

To talk little bit more around it and not to jump into conclusion right a way I like to mentioned the symposium we had this week at work. Three professors from different universities where talking about different way of teaching, knowledge sharing and similar topics. First one Joseph Kessels started very slowly, but as a time goes it gets very interesting. Unfortunately he runs out of time, but I think his presentation was the most interesting. He was talking a lot about same ideas, which I have read in book of Ken Robinson. Interesting was his talk about other issue with connection how we educate our children.

Interesting idea, which I guess not many people realize, is that our style of education, with fixed curriculum, organized by age of children and testing in classrooms is heavily result of industrial revolution and preparing people for work with technologies of 19-20th century. Also what strikes me is the following fact in connection with education style. Think how value of university degree has degraded in last 20-30 years. When you got your title 30 years ago you had almost warranty that you get very good job. These days there is so many people with titles that it doesn’t warranties anything.

Proposal, which is behind all these thoughts is that we should support personal education to help people find what their element is and help them to get knowledge and experience in that area. If we have people who do they thing, the thing they can do best, the overall result will be better and not only due to better work, but because there will be more happy people.

When I come back to myself. I am planning to apply these ideas at my job and modify my courses in this direction. Offer the possibility for people to drive they education by their interest and needs. I’ll trying to support it as much as I can.

I would love to offer also course in area of photography with similar aproach. I always dreamed about teaching a creativity course, not course which will tell you, which button you should press, but how you should aproach subject and technology to create the image from your mind.

And finally, I may know what my element is. I am not hundred percent sure, but I think teaching is it for me…