And, of course, I'd love to see Bill Gates teach sentence structure to a class of forty 14-year olds if class size doesn't matter.

In my last post about Teacher Credibility, I shared how my efforts to forge relationships and build trust with my students has resulted in greater success in my recent lessons about everyone's least favorite Language Arts subject: grammar.

This got me thinking about Bill Gates et al.'s assertions about increasing class sizes. Rather than take the standard educator response about the value of connecting to each student blah, blah, blah, I instead thought about sales.

Now, when someone like Bill Gates or his counterpart Steve Jobs stands up in front of a cavernous convention hall, people listen because of who these men are and what they seem to represent to their respective companies and industry.

But let's go back to the early days of business. Had Gates invited a bunch of tech company honchos to a cavernous convention hall, packed them in and pitched his premise without credibility, no one would have listened. Instead, Gates did what good entrepreneurs everywhere do: he focused his efforts on building connections. In 1975, Microsoft began with a single business connection between Gates and his then-partner Paul Allen and the microcomputer company MITS. After five years of developing credibility through work with MITS, IBM was finally willing to listen to what Gates had to offer, and in 1980 began talks with Gates about his ideas for operating systems. 

Despite the behemoth Microsoft has become, it too started small, with individual connections. Had Gates been unable to develop credibility in the late seventies, there would be no Microsoft today. 

Non-edcuators are so fond of ascribing free-market or business-model concepts to public education. But in doing so, they seem to forget some of the critical concepts which lead to the success–and to the failure–of capital oriented business. It mattered the size of audience to which Gates pitched his first ideas. Had he stood in front of a packed convention hall of tech leaders in 1975 and preached his prowess as a programmer, he might have gotten a job offer, but chances are that his credibility as an untested undergrad would not have gotten him to the place he is now. Instead, he started with a small, focused audience. 

Which is what also works to foster success in the classroom. Credibility is a necessary factor in the effectiveness of a teacher, and an audience of fickle young'uns will not be impressed by a resume with degrees or certificates. They will only be willing to ascribe credibility to that talking head at the front of the room if that talking head takes the time to connect with them. When there are more of "them," it is not impossible for credibility to be built, but it will simply take more time…and might not happen in time to really get them to buy into the content needed for the high-stakes all-or-nothing if-you-don't-pass-we-will-punish-your-school tests.

A simpler analogy is car sales. If you were to walk onto a car lot and get herded into a room with 30 other prospective buyers, even a business psychology 101 student would be quick to point out the error in the sales tactic. The sales rate, and net profit, would simply be higher with more one-on-one sales contact and effective persuasion, even if that means investing in more salespeople.

Instead of thinking of teaching as production (producing students or graduates), we need to think of it as sales. We are "selling" information, so we have to consider how to increase the number of buyers. Packing more of them into a room and putting on a good show will not be as effective as a situation which facilitates a one-on-one sales job. The latter is simply good business.