In a classroom, training's the thing, and it begins with curriculum. Think of curriculum as everything students learn and do in a classroom, school, or training program. Most school administrations insist that such work, as an accountability measure and because it is good for teachers to think through their courses and students to know where they are intended to go, be documented and driven by a student‐facing syllabus and assignment sheet. These documents tell students what they are going to read, do, learn…and in what daily doses. They tell students what they have to do for homework, when they will be tested, and how those tests will add up to a grade.

Steve remembers his own training as a teacher. Nearly 20 years ago, he worked alongside a teacher who had been in the classroom for nearly 20 years himself. A crafty veteran, this teacher would create a syllabus, then photocopy every handout, every quiz, every test for the entire semester. For him, and his classes, the school year started with a bang, like the starting gun at a track meet. He would march his students round and round the track, over each hurdle, consistent as the mailman, stopping for nothing and no one.

Steve watched him teach a few times and he mostly lectured, telling students what he had learned (through years of dedication to his discipline, he boasted), or sometimes had the students complete worksheets in silence (they were “well”‐trained, he bragged). His other piece of advice: When you hand back a paper or test, do it at the last possible moment. That way, if students want to complain or bug you about the grade, they won't really have time. “They'll have somewhere else to be…and there's no saying you have to write them a pass.” And with that, he would let out a slightly sinister laugh.

He was actually a decent teacher, modestly revered at the school. He did his job in a tidy, efficient manner, and his students left with a baseline respect for the rules of grammar, the key terms that make up most literary narratives, and possibly having taken a sip or two at the fountain of literary wealth wherein, having read something deeply and recognized something of oneself in it, the world stops and one's being is lit up like a summer sparkler. All that said, he did his job and students did theirs, all reasonably well, and all with limited noise.

Think Like the Best Teachers

But time has passed, and our understanding of learning has changed. The best teachers are not after modest gains or doing reasonably well. Like any ambitious professional, they want to be transformative and groundbreaking. They want each day in the classroom to be potentially life changing for the students. They do not mind messiness or noise. Their approach is based on research and an awareness of the possibilities that immediacy brings to learning.

On good days, Reshan aims to be such a teacher. (Steve knows; he has observed his classes several times and his thinking about his classes dozens of times). Watching him plan and execute the “Startup 101” class that he introduced at Montclair Kimberley Academy (New Jersey) in 2015 and continued to facilitate for several years is much different from watching Steve's early mentor plan and execute a class.

We'll consider, first, Reshan's planning of his course, which was based around collaboration, producing a product or service, and working across knowledge domains. Reshan looked into research in instructional design that provides the frame/questions for how the design of the instruction or experience should be aligned to the desired learning outcomes. One initial source was the book Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). Going one layer deeper, he examined the sources that Wiggins and McTighe cite and use in this and other work, finding John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Piaget.

Reshan then looked at “project‐based” learning in K–12 environments and, once again, tracked down the deeper sources. And once again, he came across Dewey and Piaget. (If you haven't read these sources, you might not notice that, in his course design, Reshan focused almost exclusively on how and why he would teach rather than what he would teach.)

He also looked into research on transdisciplinary experiences (not necessarily grades K‐12) in the workplace and research emerging from business schools or other professional schools on multiple knowledge domains being used to solve complex problems. This research, unsurprisingly, is also rooted in the work of Piaget.

The challenge in looking at all of this research, in a complex, multivariable setting, was to avoid simple comparative or experimental studies that surfaced easily measured gains and losses or, even worse, sought to generalize outcomes and the causes for those outcomes.

For Reshan, much of the learning design that went into this class was intended to take advantage of both the relationships in the class and emergent experiences that happened through a combination of preparation (like, for example, a carefully orchestrated field trip to a tech company) and serendipity (like what happens on the walk from the subway to that tech company). To make meaning and build skills and understanding, students in Reshan's classes journaled constantly. They had to care for, chronicle, and curate their own learning. The teacher's expectations did not become a place into which to force‐fit their learning but rather a place from which to launch their learning.

The teacher gave – information, contacts, experiences – to the students at the right time to help them solve problems. Usually, the group, or subsets of the group, produced something, too, and this something could be tested in the real world, iterated upon, further refined, and ultimately pitched to a panel of master practitioners. Feedback in the moment – from such panels, from experts who advised the classes along the way, or from Reshan himself – often led to relationships and mentorship that lasted well beyond the formal end date of the class.

Intangible dimensions of learning, like engagement and participation and the ability to build one's own learning networks, were assessed. Assessment, too, differed from expectations in that it came from more than one place. It came from Reshan, sure, but also from team members, and as mentioned, the final panel and the real world. The trick, if students were looking for one, was not to build a grade; it was to build part of a life, part of a skillset, habits, and mindsets that could lead to productive application of energy and know‐how. In a class like this, they learned how to channel immediacy to help them meet their learning and doing goals.

Ask More of the Student

The departure between Steve's first mentor's approach to teaching and training and Reshan's approach is considerable.

The first approach still persists these days, but it can also be handled by computers. Students can watch the same lessons taught by Steve's first mentor, meet some daily deadlines, turn in the work, and receive a grade. With a computer, it would be only slightly less numbing than it would be with a person. It would be only slightly less of a grind. Sharing of any kind would still be discouraged, or more likely, considered cheating. Learning of any kind could take place, but the what of what's learned could also be programmed once into a computer and spit out on demand when someone needed it. Think about that for a second: some teachers are giving their students things that those students could easily get from a computer; and, in turn, their students are learning things that others could easily get from a computer.

The second approach requires everything from the students – they might have had to work weekends or nights, and in Reshan's classes, they often did so, enthusiastically and even proudly. They might have had to reach out to people outside the class when they hit a roadblock. Each student's work blurred into others' until individual contribution dissolved into a final product worth presenting to the world. And when the group submitted that final project for a “grade” to the real world, they were not waiting a week or more to receive an abstraction of a performance evaluation, that is, a letter grade, without further discussion. Instead, they were watching their own product or service living in the world, among real people, and collecting all the feedback that sparked off it, attentively taking notes that they converted into adjustments when they took the thing back – from the world, from the teacher – and worked on it again. What was learned belonged to the learner, to be activated when he or she chose to. What was built and shipped belonged to the world – to anyone who chose to pick it up, engage with it, try it on. The contribution of the teacher, in this scenario, was to promote contribution in others.

The first option is teacher facing and the students fade out of the picture from year to year as they learn to produce the same thing that others before them have produced; the second option is learner‐practitioner facing and the teacher fades out of the picture as the students learn to produce the kinds of things that only they can produce.

It's a short step to your clients or customers – those you lead or train, or to whom you sell.

The first approach gives you what you need. In fact, it's set up to produce a steady stream of easily categorizable work – to or for you, the teacher, the categorizer.

The second approach gives the student, the learner, the client, the customer what he/she needs – continuously, throughout the process – to be prepared, to assess his or her own progress, and to assess him or herself as a product or service goes live.

Make It Messier

We're now going to spend some extensive time with an actual student from Reshan's Startup 101 class because we believe it's important, as teachers, or people trying to adopt a teacher's mindset, to shift the lens from teaching (what teachers do) to learning (what students know and can do as a result of an interaction with a teacher).

Moving from teacher to learner is a flip that could just as easily be performed in sales (what customers know and can do after a sales interaction), service (what customers know and can do after a service call), leadership (what followers know and can do after working with the leader for a period of time). With that said, this section will be most relevant for trainers, since it will give them an insider's look at the mind of a truly empowered learner (i.e., trainee).

In traditional schooling, the mark of learning is a grade. In more progressive approaches, like the ones we're championing, the mark of learning is the transformation of the student him‐ or herself. We believe that these shifts in perspective pay dividends in the life of a student, and we believe that such benefits could easily transfer to the life of a colleague, direct report, client, customer, trainee, and so on. Whenever people shift into the mode of a teacher focused on, if not obsessed with, the learning of others, they stand to benefit the people with whom they most directly interact.

Nico Espinosa Dice, a student at Harvey Mudd College at the time of this book's writing, is the student on whom we will focus.

Nico's experience in Startup 101 is reflective of what happens when a teacher creates an experience that offers immediacy to his or her students – giving them what they need, when they need it – while also teaching them to apply the tools of immediacy – that is, helping them to develop the skills and mindsets to pull in what they need when they need it.

When Steve and a colleague (Jill Maza) interviewed him, Nico started off by describing the process that Reshan set up for the course. The process asked the participants to seek constant feedback and make adjustments based on that feedback. Nico responded well to the challenge:

I like the experience of trying something, failing, trying again, and figuring it out. It's an interesting form of problem-solving. (Espinosa Dice, personal statement, 2018)

As you know if you've been through either, the typical school or training experience is often much different from what Nico describes. In a traditional classroom, if you try something and fail, then that unit is over. You either have to do it again to reach the desired result of the teacher/trainer, or you have to roll that failure into an accruing average grade that will be printed on a transcript or, ultimately, determine your worthiness to graduate from the training program. And you certainly wouldn't “like” that kind of failure in that kind of setting.

From the start, Nico and his group described a very different relationship with failure and therefore a very different relationship with learning – failure meant that they had to start again and find a different way to attack their problem. And they found such failure – such fuel for learning – by receiving feedback directly, immediately, from their environment. They didn't have to wait for a teacher to tell them how they were doing.

As Reshan observed their work – they were asked to document it publicly each day so that he wouldn't have to guess at what they were thinking or where they were at in their process – he layered in tools and approaches to aid in their problem‐solving. He not only wanted them to learn well, and apply what they learned, but also to be stronger and more capable each day. Here Nico reflects on brainstorming with rigor, a concept that Reshan introduced early.

I thought that brainstorming was just throwing out ideas and seeing if they hit the wall. Reshan showed us that brainstorming was a much more strategized type of idea‐creating – I don't think I have ever been a part of anything like that. Creating ideas…there really is a strategy behind it, like there is a strategy behind marketing, or business, or anything like that. (Espinosa Dice, personal statement, 2018)

Reshan then pushed further, helping students to sharpen their approach by focusing on problem‐finding and constant testing with potential users, all noted and appreciated by Nico.

There's an issue with that sort of thinking, where you say, “I want to start a company. What problem am I going to solve? Or what company am I going to create?” That gears you toward solution‐based thinking, that is, you're thinking of a company that is a solution to a problem. The issue with that is that the problem may not exist. So, trying to align yourself with the user or the customer has been a big focus and something that I certainly didn't realize coming into it.

The design process employed, and directly taught and overseen by Reshan, gained oxygen from immediacy. Students were coached to continually test their assertions against relevant, even emerging research and via up‐to‐the‐minute surveys, up‐to‐the‐minute contact with a real‐world audience. Reshan's role as the teacher was to help these students access what they needed, when they needed it, to solve problems that were important to them.

And if feedback was the first tool of immediacy that the students learned to wield, the next tool involved networks. When necessary, Reshan introduced either his own counsel or encouraged the group to reach out to others who might help them. While networks can often deliver contacts, insight, or skills at the right time, they can also deliver psychological benefits when times are tough or a project is lagging. Here, Nico articulates just that:

We had an idea. We pursued it, researched it, and realized it didn't work. We tried to pivot to another iteration, didn't like that, and ended up pursuing another idea through one or two iterations, and that didn't work either. We were really supposed to have had our idea at the end of the first week, but talking to Dr. Richards and talking to other people who know the startup process, we learned that [idea generation] is certainly not a process you can rush because the idea is central – it's what you're going to build off. (Espinosa Dice, personal statement, 2018)

Additionally, networks can aid in immediacy if students – and others – learn to activate them at the right time. (Note how far afield we now are from the vacuum‐packed courses run by Steve's original mentor.) Nico described that process:

We have this board in the room that we're working on. We have Post‐its on it [detailing] tasks or projects that we have to complete. A lot of them are contacts that we want to reach out to. Figuring out when to tap into each contact is very important. [For example,] Dr. Richards has a friend who's a venture capitalist. We didn't want to jump right to him before we had our idea because he might not be able to help us there.

I think it's been an interesting experience trying to visualize all the contacts in the networks and essentially the help that you have [access to] and figuring out…it's almost like a puzzle, like when do I place this piece there?

And then there's the ultimate lesson, which is that you want to be part of someone else's immediacy options, you want to be accessible, engage‐able, and helpful when someone else needs you. That's the moral lesson of transacting in this kind of win‐win‐win manner, and Nico certainly picked up on it.

A little of it, too, is, “What can I give back to them?” When there's a relationship, there's a give and take, so trying to figure out what we can return to them [is important]. Dev Basu, CEO of Powered By Search, was [helping us] out of, really, kindness. He had a relationship with Dr. Richards. But eventually, hopefully, we'll be able to give something back to him. Maybe sometime when we're in a situation where somebody says, “I need a marketing company,” we'll point them in the direction of Powered by Search. (Espinosa Dice, personal statement, 2018)

All of the above adds up to a fundamentally different kind of educational experience. In teaching circles, it is sometimes referred to as active learning or project‐based learning. Done well, the outcome is not a strong grade but a strong student – a student stretched beyond where he thought he'd be.

Many students – and adults – sleepwalk through passive learning environments just long enough and competently enough to earn a ticket out of them. They deserve better; the institutions they go on to serve deserve better. Better, in these cases, begins with the way in which we design learning experiences, whether they be one‐time customer interactions, sales transactions, graduate level classes, or company training programs.

What we know about teaching and learning validates experiential practice as a means to building understanding (in one's self, in someone for whom you are responsible). If you want someone to understand something – whether it be entrepreneurship or a product or a service – don't just tell them about the work but have them experience it, even if this experience is messy or leaves open loops.

In sales, for example, if you are selling a new piece of software, you can describe the features or have the customer experience them, trying them in a pilot. This move might add time to the sales cycle, but it raises the probability that the customers will make an informed decision of why they wanted to buy or not buy.

As a leader, you may already know the decision and the direction you want your team to follow. But building in messy time to explore, discuss, and analyze the problem will help to build buy‐in, or at least an understanding of your direction, even if it is not one with which your team agrees.

In training, it might take longer for learners to practice, receive feedback, and revise their articulation of a response or explanation of a new product or service, but it will be more effective than if they just checked off answers on a quiz.

In service, explanations matter. After resolving an issue, an effective service professional will spend time with the customer, explaining what happened and how and why a solution was applied. He or she will then give the customer a chance to ask questions and will answer them respectfully.

As Nico described, immediacy of experience often leads to long‐term perspective shifts, deeper relationships, and network gains.