Teaching and Designing

"Teaching is the best way to learn something". We believed this for a while, but now we're not so sure.

When we think of teaching we probably think of the delivery bit - showing up and, well, teaching.

But the delivery part isn't much of it at all.

The design is where the learning is.

The most recent program we built is 10 hours of 'teaching' delivery - but had a team of 4 working on it for 6 months.

The learning came from designing the teaching.

• How do we get into this topic?
• What does this term actually mean?
• Which foundational models to use?
• Where to put the scaffolds?
• How do we transition from this concept to that one?
• Where to change tempo, intensity, modality?

And a bazillion other questions.

Levels of material, experience, depth, how concepts link together.

This is why we get a bee in our bonnet about so much of education - online courses, sure, but plenty of the formal stuff too. Having knowledge doesn't mean you can teach it.

Being able to teach it doesn't mean you really know it.

So yes, teaching is the best way to learn something. If you're designing it, too.