Teaching Step By Step

As I re-enter the world of office work after having no success with obtaining a teaching job, I realized how much I have learned about how people learn. As I was being trained to make phone calls in reference to obtaining an invoice for my office, I realized how important it is to provide your learner with a foundation of basics before actually showing your learner the main material. Without a foundation of such information as a glossary of acronyms or terms that need to be understood before learning all concepts, the main idea cannot be learned without excessive repetition. For example, when I was being taught how to access vendor information I had no idea why I needed that information. I didn't even know what an invoice looked like to be able to find it. So, a foundation for this type of lesson would have been to first view at least one or two forms of invoices so that I could identify them, or simply go over how to bring up different screens in the system and identify their function before actually looking at the invoices themselves. In a class full of English students I found it very useful to simply go back to basics when it came to learning how to write. I taught them how to find their subject matter first, how to organize it next through their choice of brainstorming, and then how to form coherent paragraphs before actually writing their complete essay. Always, learning can be much more effective if taught in a step by step approach so that the instructor can clearly see which step may need more explanation and practise than the others.