In informal education at its best, the teacher does not initiate teaching based on a preconceived lesson plan. Rather, she responds to the student's questions or situation. Reinhard Zurcher, a scholar at the University of Education, Vienna, says, "If teachers or mentors teach situationally and without reference to a structured content, they teach informally." This could mean simply answering a child's question about how to spell something while he is writing, or trying to respond to the age-old question, "Why is the sky blue?"
Formal education in schools frequently revolves around a teacher lecturing to silent students. By contrast, informal and nonformal education is a conversation, with neither teacher nor learner dominating the dialogue. You could say that Socrates' dialogues with his students are a model of this sort of education, although it's clear that Socrates usually is right. A more common model is the "see one, do one, teach one" model, where a learner watches a more experienced person do something, tries to do it himself and then returns to the expert to ask questions and watch some more before trying again. Neither learner nor teacher is always sure where the investigation is going; there is no right answer, as in formal schooling, but rather an open-ended inquiry.
Informal education is usually more egalitarian than formal schooling. The teacher may know how to do one or two things better than the learner, but otherwise they are on the same footing socially. The teacher may even be quite a bit younger than the learner, as every parent has experienced when a child teaches the parent how to do something on a computer. In fact, in author Ivan Illich's view, everybody in the "deschooled society" should see teaching as one of her roles in life, all through her life. Lifelong learning is the norm is such a society.
In formal schooling, one lesson plan fits all: the teacher tries to come up with a method of presenting information that can be understood by most of the students. But in informal learning, the teacher can gear the "lesson" specifically to the one learner he has in front of him at that moment. A beautiful example of this is the way Helen Keller's teacher, Ann Sullivan, found a way to teach the blind, deaf and mute Helen by spelling words into her hand.