I love it when I come across little sparks that make me consider things that I have never paused to look at before. I have often pondered whether learners who struggle with a task are more proficient at teaching it then those who didn’t…purely because in order to learn it they had to think about how they were learning and break down the process. I have never thought about the flip side of this coin…are teachers who easily form understandings of tasks and concepts at a disadvantage when it comes to teaching it simply because they have never had to break it down? I looked in to this a little closer and found this video on Youtube by Nick Reese. It is from a sales/business perspective but a lot of what he says is transferrable…sift through it a little bit and substitute the word “client” for the word “student”…feel free to tune out at about 4 minutes.
This post might seem to be a bit unstructured and all over the place; this is because this idea has boggled my mind! I didn’t struggle with many things at school, some would call be an over achiever, however sometimes maths really got me stumped. I hated it and it did not come easily to me at all. On my first placement when I had to actually teach a maths class I felt overwhelmed and underqualified to be imparting my limited mathematical knowledge to the next generation. I surprised myself when the lesson (whilst not sticking to the lesson plan I had spent a few hours working on the night before) was a roaring success! I loved teaching this subject that I had always hated!
My first goal on my next placement is to consider the steps I might gloss over when teaching things that come naturally to me…I am going to be conscious of this curse of knowledge and work to overcome it in my classroom.
Mind blown….
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