How Not to Teach 173
Mistake #4: Thinking that students are not worried about the purpose of what they are being taught
Mistake #5: Thinking that studying can replace repeated practice as a key learning technique
Mistake #6: Thinking that because students have chosen to take your course, they have an interest in learning what you plan to teach them
Mistake# 7: Correcting a student who is doing something wrong by telling him what to do instead
Mistake #8: Thinking that a student remembers what you just taught him
Now, let’s consider these teaching mistakes one by one.
Mistake #1: Assuming that there is some kind of learning other than learning by doing
All of us, teachers or not, believe that we can teach by telling. When I say that people learn by doing, people think: Yes, maybe most of the time, but you also can learn by being told. The issue is what it means to learn, of course. I define learning in terms of the cognitive processes that are exercised during the attempt to learn.
This means that when I say the following: “You cannot learn by being told,” what I mean is that that you cannot learn to do any cog- nitive process by being told. I can tell you that George Washington never told a lie, and you could learn that and you could make it some- thing that you now believe. But this is not learning in the sense that it doesn’t make you more capable of doing something because you have learned it. Subject-based education relies on learning by telling because for most of the things that are being taught, there is no other way to learn them. How else could you learn that George Washington never told a lie? By observation? By historical research? We learn this by being told. But we do not learn cognitive processes by simply being told. We learn them by practicing them.
This confusion is why teaching in its current form, with a teacher in front of a class, exists at all. Without this focus on subject-based education, it could not exist. And, this is why parents never stand in front of their kids teaching them things. Cognitive processes cannot be altered by telling.
So, we have rule #1 for teaching:
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