Lina Ashar on Education

Welcome to the second episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Lina Ashar, the founder of Dreamtime Learning. We discuss how to shift from transactional to transformational teaching.

We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

The AI-generated transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency.

Highlights:

* “We do not [as society] design the education system or the learning sessions in the way their brain actually works. What we're doing is like a factory model. It's like compliance, not curiosity.”

* “I keep teaching kids about their brains and their behavior in every session. Because if kids can master their brains, their thoughts, their actions, and therefore their behaviors, they're going to be successful. That's a given. But if they master only what is calculus, or what this is and what that is, even though they may get an A+, success is not a given. Because you can master content, but if you have to master yourself, you're lost.”

* “If their whole school time is spent on learning the core curriculum, where is the time for kids to specialize? Where do they get those 10,000 hours that they need to become a specialist? So you have to free up time in the child's day for them to become highly specialized.”

* [Lina discusses one of the exercises she does with the kids.] “You take one of the things the President said, it's recorded and on video. You take CNN's take on it, and then you take Fox's take on it, [and you show it to the kids]. This exercise teaches kids about communication and cognitive bias.”

* “The number one reason anyone disrupts anything is because they're bored. My kids rate our lessons. If one of our lessons doesn't get rated highly, we go back to redesign it.”

* “Kids can be bored for a couple of reasons. Either the learning challenge is too much or it's too low. They're either bored because they can't comprehend and progress to the next step, or they're bored because it's too simple. One solution is to create scaffolding processes for kids who are over-challenged, whose brains aren't able to connect what you're teaching to what they know. The second thing is, if you scaffold within the lesson plan itself, you solve 90% of your problem.”

* “To parents, I say, please be brave. Please be more courageous. Please don't be scared of change because the world around your kids is changing so rapidly. Embrace it and dare to help them learn differently.”

Full Transcript:

Ismail (00:00)

Welcome, Lina, to our podcast, Patterns and Stories.

Looking back, what do you think were the biggest gaps in the current or traditional education that you wanted to fix? What were the key things that you wanted to address urgently?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (00:28)

You use the word reform, right, in your question, and it's very difficult to reform anything, especially in education. So you basically just have to go in there, do your disruptive thing, and hope it sticks. It's as crazy and as simple as that.

I always say I'm a positive disruptor, I'm an outlaw, right? Because I'm always the cowboy trying to do very different things, especially in places like India that are still very conventional in their thinking. We were ruled by the British Raj; the education system was set up by the British in India, and we've not really been able to pull away from that.

Where public policy and reforms are really challenging, I think it takes disruptive entrepreneurs just to come in, shake things up, and then when it works, then everybody says, wow, this works, and let