Leadership Training Chapter 7 – Over-Teaching

Chapter 7 – Over-Teaching

Over-Teaching vs. Over-Learning

Over-teaching and over-learning are both traps. The difference is who generates the trap.

Definitions

Over-teaching is a training session led by an instructor who does not follow building block protocols.

Over-learning is a process by which a student or trainee spends so much time practicing a rote-learned skill that the reasoning behind the skill is lost in repetition. This chapter focuses on over-teaching.

The Rule

DO NOT OVER-TEACH!

Over-teaching generally occurs when an instructor does not fully grasp the underlying reason for a topic or skill. So rather than teaching a progression using levels of learning – rote, understanding, application, correlation – the instructor gets stuck at the rote learning level. Imagine teaching someone to hammer a nail into a piece of wood:

• Rote – How to hold the hammer, how to swing the hammer, how to aim at the nail, how not to smash your thumb with the hammer.
• Understanding – Types of hammers, types of nails, types of wood. Using the best tool for the job.
• Application – Estimating the quantity of nails needed for a job. Deciding when is using a wood screw a better choice.
• Correlation – Hammering while standing on a ladder, or standing on a roof. Maybe using a nail gun is a better idea.

If an instructor does not understand the uses of different types of hammers, when to use a nail vs. a screw, and all the other elements of understanding, application, and correlation, then it’s easy to show someone how to swing a hammer and have them practice it over and over and over. And over and over and over. Then you send the student home and tell him/her to practice and practice and practice. And practice.

Eventually the student will perform the skill without thinking, without any understanding of why. He or she gets to a point where the skill is performed automatically without vision or appreciation of the surroundings. If the student happens to practice incorrectly, then it gets worse, because then your are anchoring bad technique.
And if the student goes home and heads to the roof to hammer a nail, all manner of chaos may ensue.

In this situation, you are not training someone to become a carpenter, you are training someone to hit a nail with a hammer.

Training Students vs. Training Trainers

When you are training students, your job is to communicate specific intellectual property, or content in a way that is clear and retainable. It is different if you are training trainers. Instructor training programs are about teaching teaching, not about teaching a company’s content or intellectual property.

For example, a scuba instructor-trainer who is facing a moment where he/she does not know how to teach an instructor candidate how to teach a particular skill will simply teach that skill. This reverts a scuba instructor training course from a teaching class to a diving class.

A candidate for instructor-trainer should come into the instructor training class completely comfortable with the skills or intellectual property at hand…the instructor training class, like this course, is only to teach that person how to teach the skills and material.

Summary

Avoid over-teaching by presenting the underlying reasons for everything.

EXERCISE – OVER-TEACHING

In this exercise we are going to teach the same topic twice. Break into teams and choose a very technical topic that you believe the other team does not have a lot of knowledge of. Choose something obscure and complicated. It can be an academic topic or a physical skill. Be creative. Establish three effective questions that you can use to test whether your students understand the topic. Create two five minute lessons that teach the topic at a very advanced level. In the first lesson, try to go directly to correlation, skip all the building block steps. At the conclusion of your short presentation, ask someone to explain your topic. Then teach the lesson again, this time using the building block technique and levels of learning. Create common ground, then expand on it, then create more common ground, then expand on that, and so on. Ask your three questions again. Time permitting, have one of your “students” teach the topic.