Question: What do elite athletes and elite teachers have in common?

Answer: Both resent the commonly expressed opinion that the primary reason behind their success is innate talent, that they’re good because they’re “naturals,” because they’re “gifted.”

Such attitudes demean the hard work and long hours over many years that these “stars” devoted to develop the skills that they now make look effortless. Indeed, on a more insidious level, this conventional wisdom provides a handy excuse for all the rest of us average Joes.

“Oh, I could play in the NFL, too, if I could run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds. I could be a great teacher if I had ‘charisma.’ ”

Well, maybe. But no one will ever know since I never put in the time and effort to prove it. There are plenty of big, fast guys sitting on bar stools watching, not playing, and plenty of charming and articulate men and women who aren’t inspiring young children in classrooms.

This tendency to attribute our problems to the absence or shortage of “the right people” applies widely across our society. Look carefully at the complaint expressed by so many employers, “I can’t find good help”; at the complaint of so many voters, “There aren’t any politicians willing to work across party lines.” What they’re really saying is that we’re not looking carefully enough at our job preparation and candidate selection process.

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Chip Kelly – former New Hampshire football coach now with the Philadelphia Eagles – is changing radically the way professionals study and play football. He spends less time sorting through data on the height, weight and speed of potential draftees and more time flashing pictures of offensive formations on a big screen and requiring the players he’s already got to shout out a defensive response. Then he speeds up the time the picture remains on the screen, and then speeds it up again … and again … and again. In effect, he’s using flash cards to teach the football equivalent of multiplication tables and drilling his players until they’re capable of giving the correct response – in a flash – whatever the pressure, noise, distractions and deceptions the actual test conditions may present.

No room for, “Oh, I don’t have the talent for numbers” in this classroom.

The lesson here is that the answer to our problems lies not in finding the “right” people, but in pushing harder and harder into the details of how we teach all the people. We must drastically and ceaselessly increase the ways we teach, the places we teach, the length of time we teach and the people we employ to teach. We must make the idea of bringing teachers into the workplace normal rather than exceptional. We must reward the process of improving teaching skills, rather than presenting it as punishment forced only on those not performing. We must make lifelong learning an activity required of everyone with a job rather than something to occupy the time of those who have left their jobs.

The newest buzzword in economic development is “entrepreneurial ecosystem.” To me, the concept behind this addition to the ever-changing lingo of bureaucratic fog talk is “increase learning.” We need to find ways to bring people together (or just allow them to bump into one another) in ways that increase the “Eureka!” moments, in ways that make more light bulbs flash inside enthusiastic and highly motivated minds.

And one way to do just that might be to peek inside the Eagles’ training facilities run by a New England teacher who followed his nose from New Hampshire to Oregon to the City of Brotherly Love.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com


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