Focus 2 Achieve - ED! Blog

Wanna Learn Something? Teach It!

Jun 29, 2016 04:26 pm | Oskar Cymerman

By Oskar Cymerman | @focus2achieve | BAm! Radio Network EdWords Blogger

"If you can teach it you really understand it."

Think about it. Could you explain to a 5 year old what your favorite musical artist, sport, or hobby is all about? Sure you could. You'd be able to give a lot of information with all kinds of details. It's because you studied it a lot. In a sense, you were preparing for that "presentation" for a long time.

But how about teaching something not yet so familiar? In my opinion, teachers do it all the time. Some concepts we find ourselves teaching might be buried deep in our memory, because we have not taught them for a long time. In some situations though, we are asked to teach something we have not before and have limited knowledge of. We might be uncomfortable at first. We might be nervous about it and we do it. And, in most cases, we do it well.

It's because of our preparation process! We have it down to a tee, so when the time comes to present something new to our students we are ready. The teacher prep process allows us tolearn the information relatively quickly and when we teach it we master it.

What if we taught our students the process? What if we asked them to teach?

I recently interviewed a High School teacher in Woodbury, MN who uses the process. Check it out.

MESSAGE TO TEACHERS: While time constraints might not allow you to have students teach each other in the way presented above all the time, try to incorporate several such activities per semester. They would be the bigger projects, could be collaborative, are a lot of fun, and really supercharge student learning. And isn't this what this shindig is all about?

Thanks for your time! I hope you find the infographic above useful. Please share it with other teachers, students, and parents. You can access all other Brain-Based Learning infographics I created by scrolling down my ED!Blog. I will feature more Brain-Based Learning teaching tools, metacognitive strategies, and posts on social-emotional learning in my future NEWSLETTERS, so please SIGN UP if you would like to receive tips that help students become better learners and you're looking to add more weapons of mass creation to your teaching arsenal :)

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