Whether you are a formal or informal leader in your organization, there is a near 100% likelihood that you’ve had to help a peer and teach them a new skill, tool, trick, etc. Most of us enjoy helping others advance, so we find the experience a positive one even if it may take some time with the potential to be inconvenient. Since few of us are trained teachers, we actually don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how we teach others.
In a busy workplace and as informal teacher, typically we simply just quickly demonstrate what needs to be done and as the student to replicate our actions. “Click here, press Open, drag the object, click resize” and so on. The student may observe and then go out on their own and try it. This teaching/learning model is what is done throughout the animal kingdom.
For example, chimpanzees learn to crack nuts in a very similar fashion based on some research completed in the early 1980’s. They watch the elders around them. They learn to master the key behaviors necessary to crack a nut (pick it up, place it on a rock, hold another rock, hit the rocks together, eat the nut). Interestingly, it takes significant time for the chimpanzees to go from individual behaviors to actually completing the full process. In fact it takes less than 6 months to learn the individual behaviors, but it takes 3-7 years to put the process together and actually crack and eat nuts.
What’s the point of the story? All animals can learn behaviors from simple mimicry – that is absolutely teaching. It may be slow, laborious, and frustrating, but they will learn if it is critical to survival. Since we have so much more process/logic capacity in our brains, we should make sure to utilize that in our teaching to take us beyond simple mimicry. Several studies have proposed that the most uniquely human trait is the ability to understand and remember sequences.
As either formal or informal teachers, that piece of information should be front and center in our mind. The best way to aid in memory isn’t to ask the student to memorize the steps, it’s taking the time to make sure the student understands why the steps are important and why they are ordered the way they are. With that information, not only will a student be able to replicate the lesson that you are teaching, but also it will likely open their eyes to different ways the skills, tools, tricks, etc. your are teaching could be used in their every day lives.
Chimpanzees don’t have this skill. They tediously learn to solve a single problem: cracking a nut. But humans have the ability to transfer learning from one context to another, especially with a little guidance.
As a teacher take the time to go beyond mimicry. The extra time will benefit the student infinitely and will likely save you time later as the student will have more intellectual tools to solve a wider array of problems.
View from the Middle 