Who said teaching is the best way to learn

And as they explain the information to her, they identify knots and gaps in their own thinking. Sandra Okita, an assistant professor of technology and education at Teachers College, reported in on the use of a teachable agent by high school students learning to engage in deductive reasoning.

Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Teachers, therefore, should do the following:. Sound teaching usually begins with questions and phenomena that are interesting and familiar to students, not with abstractions or phenomena outside their range of perception, understanding, or knowledge. Students need to have many and varied opportunities for collecting, sorting and cataloging; observing, note taking and sketching; interviewing, polling, and surveying; and using hand lenses, microscopes, thermometers, cameras, and other common instruments.

They should dissect; measure, count, graph, and compute; explore the chemical properties of common substances; plant and cultivate; and systematically observe the social behavior of humans and other animals. Among these activities, none is more important than measurement, in that figuring out what to measure, what instruments to use, how to check the correctness of measurements, and how to configure and make sense out of the results are at the heart of much of science and engineering.

This puts a premium, just as science does, on careful observation and thoughtful analysis. Students need guidance, encouragement, and practice in collecting, sorting, and analyzing evidence, and in building arguments based on it. However, if such activities are not to be destructively boring, they must lead to some intellectually satisfying payoff that students care about.

During their school years, students should encounter many scientific ideas presented in historical context.

It matters less which particular episodes teachers select in addition to the few key episodes presented in Chapter 10 than that the selection represent the scope and diversity of the scientific enterprise. Students can develop a sense of how science really happens by learning something of the growth of scientific ideas, of the twists and turns on the way to our current understanding of such ideas, of the roles played by different investigators and commentators, and of the interplay between evidence and theory over time.

It is important, for example, for students to become aware that women and minorities have made significant contributions in spite of the barriers put in their way by society; that the roots of science, mathematics, and technology go back to the early Egyptian, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese cultures; and that scientists bring to their work the values and prejudices of the cultures in which they live.

Effective oral and written communication is so important in every facet of life that teachers of every subject and at every level should place a high priority on it for all students. In addition, science teachers should emphasize clear expression, because the role of evidence and the unambiguous replication of evidence cannot be understood without some struggle to express one's own procedures, findings, and ideas rigorously, and to decode the accounts of others.

The collaborative nature of scientific and technological work should be strongly reinforced by frequent group activity in the classroom. Scientists and engineers work mostly in groups and less often as isolated investigators. Similarly, students should gain experience sharing responsibility for learning with each other. In the process of coming to common understandings, students in a group must frequently inform each other about procedures and meanings, argue over findings, and assess how the task is progressing.

In the context of team responsibility, feedback and communication become more realistic and of a character very different from the usual individualistic textbook-homework-recitation approach.

In science, conclusions and the methods that lead to them are tightly coupled. The nature of inquiry depends on what is being investigated, and what is learned depends on the methods used. Science teaching that attempts solely to impart to students the accumulated knowledge of a field leads to very little understanding and certainly not to the development of intellectual independence and facility.

Science teachers should help students to acquire both scientific knowledge of the world and scientific habits of mind at the same time. Understanding rather than vocabulary should be the main purpose of science teaching. Some technical terms are therefore helpful for everyone, but the number of essential ones is relatively small. If teachers introduce technical terms only as needed to clarify thinking and promote effective communication, then students will gradually build a functional vocabulary that will survive beyond the next test.

For teachers to concentrate on vocabulary, however, is to detract from science as a process, to put learning for understanding in jeopardy, and to risk being misled about what students have learned.

Science is more than a body of knowledge and a way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. It is also a social activity that incorporates certain human values. However, they are all highly characteristic of the scientific endeavor. In learning science, students should encounter such values as part of their experience, not as empty claims.

This suggests that teachers should strive to do the following:. Science, mathematics, and technology do not create curiosity. The results we have seen—like in Ms. She could see that her students were more confident in the lesson.

Given all these positive outcomes, I asked Richard if there is any downside to using the learning by teaching strategy. He cautioned that the approach could backfire if students do not fully understand the concept before teaching it. Students can actually become more invested in the wrong explanation. To avoid this outcome, Richard said teachers should make certain that students understand the concept before they teach it. While this downside is something we are aware of, we still have more to learn.

After talking with Bror and Richard, I am even more excited about the learning by teaching strategy. The learning science is clear and the concept is simple. Learning by teaching is a strategy anyone can do and we know it improves learning outcomes. I would love to see more teachers follow in Ms. Sign up for our Newsletter. Like this article? Have Them Teach It. However, no one wants to admit we all need to change a great deal to continue our existence.

This comes from two big paces. First, the feelimg and impressiom that there is no hope. Second, with change comes pain, and people are taught to run from pain, so they hide… We need to create hope. The two fears to focus on are food imsecirty, and homelessness.

No one should be afraid to take on a new challenge because they fear ending up on the streets. And no one should have to sleep on a sidewalk and be dehumanized in front of the world.

If you eliminate those basic fears it will unlock even more human potential. And at first it will appear to be bizaar and hard to understand. That is where the change will really begin. I apologize if my grammar is off. I was never good at being processed through the current system. Because of this I found alternative paths through similar circumstances to what you are describing. Part of my path has been difficult without ever being taught to properly explain myself through standard means..

Or that I used to just not care. We can still make the world a better place for future generations. Look at the work N Square is doing around removing nuclear power.

There has to be a way clean up our past mistakes by using the tools and levers available today. This article is poorly written. Multiple spelling mistakes and loads of incomprehensible sentences. Thank you for nothing. The Montessori approach was a good try, but ot good enough. I strongly agree with that! Teaching students but students are not learning then Teaching is useless!

See to it that the students will learn or learnt from what teachers are bound to do. Like me, I learnt a lot and now I have my own business. Subscribe on iTunes! Ways of Learning There are many different ways of learning; teaching is only one of them.

The objective of education is learning, not teaching. Learning through Explanation This aspect of learning through explanation has been overlooked by most commentators.