Understand - Instructor Tools

It is down to the individual trying to master the skill to Understand; to figure out for themselves how and why this skill will accomplish their goal.  No doubt the instructor will have already figured it out and while we may be apt in explaining the how and why, the student has to experience it.  If you have not already, please read the other pages in the Understand section before continuing here.

Make them experiment:  In the Know section we discussed answering questions.  You are going to get questions like "How do you [do something]?", "Is it better to [do this] or [do that]?", "Why does [that] work?"  Deep and expansive answers will spring to our lips but they will not be as good as "Try it out for yourself."  Assign and partner, have them go to work, and make them give you the answer to their question. 

Let them fail fast:  Safety not withstanding, do not be afraid to allow students to make mistakes.  Rather provide the opportunity for them to make mistakes and reflect on them as quickly as possible.  When we need to figure out what will work, we often get to it by elimination of what we discover will not work.  There is another benefit, image if you had your students work a scenario where you know there is one good solution from ten common options.  It is easy to see that then the sooner the student gets to that one the better.  This might leads us to believe that we should only expose the student to that one.  While this will give them the opportunity to understand how and why that one works, it deprives them of the nine opportunities to understand how and why the others will not work.  These ten reasons will deepen and better solidify the student's understanding.  This will make it easier for them to self-correct in the later of the Eight Stages.

Guide the experiment:  Telling a new student to go figure it out will result in a puzzled and quiet student.  Telling any student that they will figure it out eventually through any other means other than experimentation (straight repetition for example) will result is a flounder or frustrated student.  All students need to learn how to experiment, and you will need to step them through the process until they become so proficient that they just start to so it themselves.  If you have the class all working on the same technique/application, walk them through the same experimentation process.  If this type of experimentation is new to you as an instructor, still do it!  The exercise of breaking down the technique/application into bite-sized, incremental experiments will challenge your own understanding of the principles and elements that make the technique/application work.  It is difficult not to learn something even if the experiment fails to yield the right answer, as long as you reflect on with your students.  The worst case is that you'll conclude that a particular experiment is not worth repeating in the future.

Don''t skimp: This stage is too often overlooked or is reserved for "advanced" students.  It takes some trail and error to establish the practice and more to make it a habit in our training.  It is worth it.  It has expanded and deepened the skills of all LMA instructors and students of all levels, even beginners.  

Only a skill that is fully understood is foundational, adaptable and can be mastered