Teach Like You're the Student

http://steveblank.com/2010/08/10/teach-like-youre-the-student/

by icey • 16 years ago

94 17 16 years ago

kmak• 16 years ago

One of my advisors liked to bring up this quote:

The first time a teacher teaches something, the teacher learns. The second time a teacher teaches something, the students learn. After that nobody learns!

virinvictus• 16 years ago

So, the lesson is: teach them something twice, and then ignore the students. I like it.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

I was bored to tears in high school and college. If I taught like I was teaching myself, the majority of the class would be left behind and we'd all fail.

No thanks.

The real moral here is to empathize with students and then teach.

yequalsx6• 16 years ago

I teach mathematics at a community college. I definitely don't teach like I'm the student. A large majority of my students don't like mathematics and don't want to be in the class. If I taught like I was the students only a few people would pass. Few of my students have the desire to know, to learn that I had as a student.

I think his advice best applies to a group of students who care about learning and want to learn. It doesn't apply to those who don't possess these qualities.

sanderjd• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity, if this is the case, why should more than a few people in the class pass? Do you believe that shoving the material down these unwilling students' throats in such a way that they are able to pass results in a higher portion of them gaining and retaining the knowledge than would have otherwise? To me it sounds like very few in this class are interested in or successful at learning your material, so what is the definition of "passing" a class?

Sukotto• 16 years ago

You might like the dy/dan blog http://blog.mrmeyer.com His focus is on elementry/high school but I think his approach would also make college-level classes much more interesting.

There's also this delightful post from btilly http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra... that I found wonderfully informative. Make sure you read the q/a in the comments.

yequalsx6• 16 years ago

I think the reverse is more accurate. When learning something study as if you have to explain it to someone else. If you can explain it to someone who doesn't have a lot of knowledge in the particular subject you are studying then you really know it. The converse is definitely not true though.

rimantas• 16 years ago

"That the stupid pupils were these! I explained once—they did not get it. I explained second time—they still did not get it. I explained third time—I myself got it, but they did not!"

omrisiri• 16 years ago

This advice should be taken with a grain of salt. It all comes down to the level of the instructor vs the level of the students.

If i taught like i were the student, most students would be left far behind probably trying to figure out how i got from point a to b.

With that said, on occasion (during advanced courses) i can really go all the way with the students and challenge them and sometimes even myself, it's a rare synergy between the student and teacher.

In any situation teaching is an act - it all about enthusiasm - even when its the most boring subject , you need to make the students feel excited about learning it.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

The biggest mistake in teaching is not providing enough context.

So often teaching (or documentation) devolves into mere description. As if detailing every part of an automobile is a good way of teaching how one works. The human brain is a wondrous thing, so even with such a horrible method of teaching eventually smart people will pick things up. But it's a very inefficient and error prone method.

The right way to teach is to start with an abstract, low-fidelity model and then build upon that. Once students have a good mastery of the model then you can delve down into fine-grained specifics (how each component works, for example) and only then can you evolve the model into a more accurate representation.

That's why good teachers are so rare. Because it's easy to "teach" a complex system by describing each component in detail, but it's harder to come up with a series of models from low-fidelity to high-fidelity that bootstrap up from zero knowledge to expertise.

Teach Like You're the Student

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