Photo Education is Broken. Here's How to Fix It.

there's a problem with photography education that we need to address and hopefully in this video I'm going to show you how to differentiate between a good photography course and a not so good photography course or Workshop or you know online training in person trips travel trips whatever there are some some big issues that I see I've seen for a number of years and I want to address them in this video first of all I want to talk about my background uh if you've been watching this channel for a while you know I used to run a comedy school I taught improv for many years when I started teaching improv I was bad at it I was not a good teacher but I was determined to become a great teacher so what I did was I spent time studying teaching methodologies when I was young I was in a gifted program when I got to University in third year university I didn't I couldn't finish my exams in time and I remember talking to my organizational behavior and Human Resources Professor about not having enough time to finish the exam and she said I think you might have a learning disability and I said I don't know I was I was in the gifted program and she said then you more than likely have a learning disability so I went and got tested and turned out my reading speed and comprehension in third year university was at a grade 9 level but my visual Acuity was greater than 99.9 percentile they never tested anyone like me I was visually off the charts but from a reading standpoint reading text it's very difficult for my brain to process that and in business courses a lot of your exams are case studies so you have to read a case study and then answer like essay form questions on case studies my brain takes text and puts it into the form of a movie makes everything visual so that I can see what's happening when I started teaching I was aware of my learning methodology my learning style is very visual I learned from seeing something done and then being able to like analyze it and figure it out break it down to its component parts and then be able to like recreate it and understand what the component parts are doing which is important so I learned that I was a visual learner but I learned that other people are kinetic Learners kinetic Learners have to be moving other people are doers they have to like do the thing in order to actually figure it out some people can read something and they'll be able to figure it out from reading and other people are auditory Learners so that when I started teaching I was like okay I need to address kinetic Learners I need to address visual learners need to address people who need text I need to address people who are auditory Learners and so I made sure that all of our classrooms had white boards so we could write things out important things uh in text but we could also like to make diagrams to show the visual learners but then at the end of every Workshop there was also a brief period of recap I see a lot of Photography workshops from people who do not understand how to teach different sets of people a lot of people offering workshops that are just watch me do this thing and that's it I've seen people complaining on Facebook recently about how they went to a workshop and they weren't given an opportunity to actually participate their fee for the workshop was actually just paying for the instructor to work on developing their own test shoots to pay for their test shoots and and that's not fair it's not fair to the students so I want to address a number of problems that I see and the first and biggest is people who are teaching how to create finished product I see a lot of instructors selling lighting patterns which is you know can be good for some people to learn to see how you know have diagrams to see how things are structured but they don't teach why lights are placed in certain places they just say here's how to do it they don't teach why you should do things in a specific way or why they do things in a specific way not why you should do something the way I do something that's not a good way to teach I can teach you why I do something and hopefully teach you to think about what it is you're trying to do and the result you're trying to get and think about the process it takes to get there instead of just saying that's how you should do it if we look at like Peter Hurley's f-stoppers video Once Peter Hurley's f-stoppers video came out suddenly we saw a plethora of people photographing headshots like Peter Hurley did I did this you know cutting cutting in here cropping in tight to the Head plain white background but I also took the idea that like oh this is how headshots should be done and I tried to impart that onto other people what I want people and and what I want you and I think other other photographers who are learning and studying and taking courses and and what I want teachers to be doing is teaching intent teaching people this is why I do something and this is how doing it this way produces this result and changing things will adjust and produce a different result doesn't mean one is wrong or one is better than the other it just means that making changes produces uh variations but when when f-stoppers video came out uh for Peter's headshots and then the f-stoppers video came out about cinematic headshots suddenly everyone was doing cinematic headshots uh in in Dylan's style right you know taking a light and a reflector and going out to a park and shooting at 200 millimeters you just started to see that over and over and over and the problem is when you're teaching a how to create a product instead of a process you create a lot of homogeneity and replication you teach people how to replicate a result instead of understanding what it takes to create that result and and what's happening when you do that and why you might want to do that then this can also lead to Market saturation having a lot of photographers creating a lot of the same and similar work there are a number of headshot photographers in my area who shoot headshots on white headshots on Gray headshots on black and that's it that's all they do want to teach people to be thinkers instead of replicators because that allows photographers to explore and create images in their own style and voice if you don't have differentiators it's very difficult to separate yourself from everyone else if your images are the same as another photographer's image is and another photographer's images and all of you are interchangeable the only differentiator then becomes price and so when a client is looking at images and saying well I have all of these three options they all look the same except option b is the cheapest why wouldn't they go with option B so then when we're teaching people to replicate a product instead of teaching them a process what we're doing is we're not giving them the tools they need to succeed we're giving them a hammer and then they think everything is a nail doesn't allow them to adapt to changing client needs my background in improvisation allows me to be able to like adapt and change and be flexible and those are the skills that I think we need to teach photographers is is teach them to understand what the light is doing why the light is doing it how the distance and modifiers that they're putting on are changing the results you know if there's a power outage and you can't power your lights how do you still get the job done if you're not insured you can't afford to reshoot that's going to cost you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars I implore you as a photo educator to start teaching people process focus on process not product if you're a teacher who does not understand teaching methodologies I would love for you just dig in don't ask Chad gbt go to Google look at teaching methodologies understand the different types of Learners learn about the different kinds of of ways that people learn how do their brains work if you have a course or if you're developing a course how do you implement these learning methodologies in your instructional design so that the courses you're offering help everybody they don't just serve one type of person study different teaching methodologies look at the studies that are coming out that show how different people are learning the other key consideration is that when we're teaching photography courses we're typically not teaching them to children so you have to also look at it's more critical to look at teaching methodologies for adults people over 25 their brains are sort of fixed there's not a lot of neuroplasticity anymore so we have to understand adults may take more time they may take more work it may take saying the same thing in many different ways for them to be able to get the point and for them to understand what it is that you're trying to convey if you're teaching workshops in person you also need to work at providing feedback for individual people take a look at what they're doing don't just set the lights up for them have a model and then have them Point their camera they're not learning anything from that I don't want to go to a workshop and everyone's done all the lighting and everything for me you're not assessing my work you're not looking at like why am I shooting at the focal length I'm shooting at why am I shooting at the f-stop I'm shooting at why am I why is my shutter speed like this why is the distance from the subject to the light this amount of amount of space why are we putting the light in in behind the subject instead of in front of the subject you know what what are the different reasons that we could be doing different things look at individual people provide individual feedback I implore you in terms of like online learning we don't really have you know if you're doing one-to-many courses you don't really have that opportunity to provide feedback in your unless you're teaching cohort based courses you need to be able to look at an image and and assess like what is their objective and were they able to accomplish that objective as well what I would love to know from you please put it in the comments below is like what kind of learner are you what kind of things do you feel are missing from the photography education space currently thank you for watching check out the next video that pops up it really helps me out thanks very much take care