Are You a Teacher or an Educator?

The difference between an educator and a teacher is like the difference between a marketer and salesman; the marketer plants a belief of how good a product is for a client, while the salesman merely looks at every client as a means to an end. In other words, salesmen tend to see what they would get out of the sale vs what they would give them in return.  As long as that attitude dominates the communication, salesmen fail miserably. 

Nothing can be hidden and people you communicate with can see right through you; with a behavior of focusing on closing the deal, your customers wouldn’t feel you are there to serve their needs but rather to serve yours. Likewise, focusing on bringing the period to an end with one more lesson scratched out on the plan wouldn’t get the attention of your students neither it would help them absorb the concepts you worked hard to feed them with.

What marketers work hard to achieve though is to turn prospects into believers. Their ultimate goal is not selling because selling to them is no more than an outcome of believing but rather planting the idea that the product can make your life easier, more convenient, more beautiful or somehow better. 

That being said, if teachers’ focus shifts from explaining the concepts in hand –no matter how great the approach of explaining them - to instilling the importance of these concepts and how can they influence their students’ lives, students would turn into believers and would seek to learn these concepts independently by all means which activates the truest learning approach: “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand”. 

Bottom line, when teachers realize that their role cannot go beyond supporting and facilitating the learning process to learners rather than instructing information, their best weapon becomes their belief of how important the concepts are in making a difference in their students’ lives. That attitude towards knowledge is what makes the huge difference between a teacher and an educator; educators know that you cannot teach anyone anything unless they decide from the inside out to learn it and that happens only when a passion for it has been established deep inside. Simple and effective! 

How about you? Are you an educator or a teacher? Why should someone buy your knowledge from you? What is it that makes your educational style so special?   If your students tell you that they can live without the concept in hand today, can you turn them into believers in how adding it to their knowledge base can enormously influence their lives? The more you know how to answer these kinds of questions, the more difference you can make impacting the minds you are educating to make a difference in their world.