Teaching sequentially vs top down
Apr. 18th, 2016 11:27 pmSometimes you teach something complicated by teaching the first steps perfectly, and then building on that to teach the second steps perfectly, etc.
Other times you kind of teach how to fake your way through the whole thing, and then improve each bit again and again.
Both techniques are important in different circumstances, and you usually use a mix of both.
But beware of getting it wrong. Most people would not try to teach someone who's never played football by subbing them into a Premier Division match and holding them to the full set of rules. They might learn something, but they probably won't learn how to play football well. How will they learn how to kick, if no-one passes to them? Why will anyone pass to them if they can't kick?
Conversely, forcing someone to memorise a set of skills without teaching them what they're for, without teaching them what's desirable and what's undesirable, generally prevents them actually learning how do those skills.
But both mistakes are tragically easy to make. It's easy to miss when someone doesn't have the basic ground-level skills you thought you were building on. And it's easy to miss when you thought it was obvious WHY you were teaching this, but it wasn't.
Other times you kind of teach how to fake your way through the whole thing, and then improve each bit again and again.
Both techniques are important in different circumstances, and you usually use a mix of both.
But beware of getting it wrong. Most people would not try to teach someone who's never played football by subbing them into a Premier Division match and holding them to the full set of rules. They might learn something, but they probably won't learn how to play football well. How will they learn how to kick, if no-one passes to them? Why will anyone pass to them if they can't kick?
Conversely, forcing someone to memorise a set of skills without teaching them what they're for, without teaching them what's desirable and what's undesirable, generally prevents them actually learning how do those skills.
But both mistakes are tragically easy to make. It's easy to miss when someone doesn't have the basic ground-level skills you thought you were building on. And it's easy to miss when you thought it was obvious WHY you were teaching this, but it wasn't.