Engage, Don't Show

Isn't this still just "show, don't tell"? Why are we trying to coin a new term and muddy waters?

"Tell" implies some form of structured information such as music notation. "Show" implies action(s) such as actually playing the piano.

Showing is usually engaging otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.

Different students respond differently to such methods.

Personally, I dislike, and don't learn well with, the kind of teaching where I'm given a small piece of information, expected to do a task, and repeat over and over again until something clicks.

Yes, in theory it's supposed to be engaging, and encouraging further learning with all the dopamine hits, but in reality, you don't know what constitute a "reward" for an arbitrary human being. Sometimes, these well-crafted steps are just noisy to me.

What works well for me is to get the big picture first. Give me the map first, and then let's talk about how to get from A to B.

For example the author talks about how his daughter's focus instantly improved when the approach was changed to be more hands on.

I had the opposite experience learning the violin. Most of my teachers were very keen on students immediately start trying it out, after one demonstration, or even no demonstration, and I often felt it difficult to grasp what the hell I was doing. The most effective teacher I had was one who's more willing to talk about things before hand, and answer my questions with seriousness, and at length. To me this is the more engaging and effective approach.

I try to do this as much as possible. Unfortunately some people are not actually interested in knowledge transfer. Those people are just interested in unblocking themselves for the ultimate short dopamine hit. For those people doing this is like nails on a chalkboard.

"Just tell me what I need to do"

> Always explain why something is useful. Yes, even when it’s obvious to you.

I almost always wish open source repos did a better job of this.

>> I mentioned to her teacher that kids that age struggle to learn theory for that long without practicing it. He agreed, and said that many kids are motivated to get through the theory because they’ve heard their teacher play nice music and want to get there too.

Few people are open to advice. Usually results in defensive/justification response.

I don't care for the attempt to find a new catchy phrase.

But I do care about the phenomena being described. This is very common with teachers, and especially so with those teaching small kids. When violin and piano teachers couldn't keep attention of my (and other) kids long enough to teach them to learn musical notation at 4 years old, they just gave up and started handing out stickers for kids to put into them even after they turned 6 (these where part of the optional pre-school classes). Now, my kid has a good musical ear (unlike me or his younger sister :) and always had a knack for learning symbols (it intrigued him, so he could read all the digits before he could count; similarly for letters), but persistence is not his strong suit. All the stuff my kid learned to play on the piano was really the stuff he learned at home, and not in the class (and he loved the stickers and mucking around on the violin and piano).

Now, there was one student that really persevered through the messy, unmotivating teaching, started practicing at home, and this seem to have validated these teachers' approaches (when we complained they are not learning anything, they kept pointing at this kid — he was indeed great).

So basically, they filter out for those who are persistent by nature regardless of their motivation to achieve a particular goal, and they start to believe this means their approach is good — but they lose out on those who might invest enough, might even have more talent, but are not properly motivated.

This is what we talk about when we talk about adapting teaching to every individual, and that's freaking hard in a classroom setting — but must be the default in individual classes, yet so many of those classroom-teachers can't figure a single kid out.

This also happens in sports and any other learning/upskilling.

I try my best to recognize among engineers in my teams who learns best by being thrown at the problem, who needs to be paired up to have someone to bounce their ideas off, who needs to be given some upfront material so they would build up confidence before attacking a problem, or maybe build a toy example first, etc — and I also ask directly, because we are adults and we should have an idea about what works for us by the time we get a job. All of these are valid approaches to learning, and each one of us has an approach that usually works best for them. I do try experimenting with asking people to approach problem in an "unusual" (for them) way too, to see what they gain (if anything) from the approach compared to the stress they end up feeling.

What do we need to do (as a society) to ensure that anyone doing any teaching anywhere is at least aware that there is no single-approach-works-every-time solution, and that you at least let your students do a couple of different things. I feel like we should be putting students through a number of approaches and look for signals which has worked best. But how do we get there?