Yep. This is a thing. Students will learn a lesson best when the student understands the value of the lesson to them in their lives.
This is one of the six basic principles of learning, it’s called the Principle of Readiness. You can read all about it in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook alongside other smash hits as the principle of exercise (practice makes perfect) or the principle of primacy (first impressions matter). It’s that basic.
Establishing that value, giving the students the context and reason the lesson is valuable to the students is the teacher’s responsibility. And I noticed that most teachers forget this somewhere around the 7th grade. Way too many of my teachers answered “Why do we need to learn this?” with “Because it’s required to get your diploma.”
It is effectively a lie; “Practice” only makes perfect–or improvement at all–when there is some sort of feedback mechanism to judge performance. It is possible to practice something incorrectly, build the habit of doing it incorrectly, and then you will perform it incorrectly. This is why I see the math teacher habit of sending students home with lengthy assignments of problems to work to be taken up and graded like a quiz is bad practice; give students time to practice and build skill before you start punishing poor performance.
It’s so refreshing to hear this from people. practice is great, but if you’re doing it wrong and nobody tells you that, then you’re going to get great at doing it wrong. Constructive criticism is GOOD, being told you’re doing something wrong is GOOD - so long as these things are paired with suggestions for improvements, or being shown how it can be done better/more correctly.
Practice is worthless without some way to measure whether you’re actually getting better at doing what it is you’re trying to learn.
Yep. This is a thing. Students will learn a lesson best when the student understands the value of the lesson to them in their lives.
This is one of the six basic principles of learning, it’s called the Principle of Readiness. You can read all about it in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook alongside other smash hits as the principle of exercise (practice makes perfect) or the principle of primacy (first impressions matter). It’s that basic.
Establishing that value, giving the students the context and reason the lesson is valuable to the students is the teacher’s responsibility. And I noticed that most teachers forget this somewhere around the 7th grade. Way too many of my teachers answered “Why do we need to learn this?” with “Because it’s required to get your diploma.”
Practice makes perfect is a lie. At best it’s 99.(9)%. The rest is a stubbed toe.
It is effectively a lie; “Practice” only makes perfect–or improvement at all–when there is some sort of feedback mechanism to judge performance. It is possible to practice something incorrectly, build the habit of doing it incorrectly, and then you will perform it incorrectly. This is why I see the math teacher habit of sending students home with lengthy assignments of problems to work to be taken up and graded like a quiz is bad practice; give students time to practice and build skill before you start punishing poor performance.
THANK YOU.
It’s so refreshing to hear this from people. practice is great, but if you’re doing it wrong and nobody tells you that, then you’re going to get great at doing it wrong. Constructive criticism is GOOD, being told you’re doing something wrong is GOOD - so long as these things are paired with suggestions for improvements, or being shown how it can be done better/more correctly.
Practice is worthless without some way to measure whether you’re actually getting better at doing what it is you’re trying to learn.