Teaching By Challenge
01:38pm MST, 24 Jun 2002

Sometimes the best way to teach someone something basic, is to teach something more challenging.

I believe very strongly that it's important as a teacher to challenge your students.

In learning anything with a creative side, people tend to need some leeway and stuff in order to be creative, but they also need guidance and drive.

In Debugging the Development Process, Steve Macguire discusses how comfort can get in the way of success. Being comfortable tends to make people too static. In order to want to leave A and go to B, you have to feel uncomfortable to some degree with A. That level of discomfort can simply be the urging desire to get to B, but if you're too happy at A you'll never get to B.

I've found the same thing in teaching. In order to really teach something, you have to challenge people, to motivate them to move from A to B. To my mind, that means that 10% of the class will be having significant problems. That's ok. Because it means you're pushing them to their limits, and it means that the whole class is actually learning.

I know that I've sometimes stressed too much when students haven't been getting things perfectly. But perfection is not the point. The way to get people learning isn't to stand by them and walk them through every baby step. Often the real problem isn't that it's too complex--it's the opposite. You're not challenging them enough to actually engage their focus.

Steven Mitchell has a particularly masterful method for this in his Lindy Hop classes. He starts out by simply getting students to do dance movement together. Often he won't even explain what dance he's taking the exercise from. It forces you not only to get out of the mode of thinking in terms of the dance steps you know, but also to really pay attention to every detail because you don't know where he's going with it. When he finally starts talking about Lindy Hop steps, you're already in that ultra-focused state of heightened learning.

In a sense, he improves your basic dance technique by making the basics more challenging.

I'm a strong believer in teaching fundamentals by teaching advanced material. A lot of teachers are obsessed with getting their beginning students to grok the basics perfectly before letting them progress to harder stuff. I say you should give them harder stuff that requires a better understanding of the basics, and when you get them focused on making it work, throw in some exercises to improve their basics.

The students will have more fun because they can really see that they're going somewhere, and at the same time they'll master the basics more thoroughly because you're holding them to a higher standard.

I like to use this in dance classes, but it's equally applicable anywhere. I've had good math teachers use complex scenarios to motivate us to learn basic trigonometry. It was all in the context and the challenge. You don't want to completely bewilder the students, either. Just respect their abilities and drive them to excel. No one likes baby food.

Ironically, you can also use this principle in reverse. Sometimes you need to ingrain something so thoroughly that you risk numbing the students' minds with it. That's ok, if you know how to use it. The trick is to work on something mind-numbing but absolutely crucial until the point where people are starting to go nuts. They're crying out for something challenging. That's when you throw down the gloves and show them a way to apply the new skill in new ways that test their focus. Not only will they have internalized the basic skill you were working on, but the sudden change to something interesting will engage their focus like nothing else.

It's the moment when they think "yes, I want something NEW!" And that's when you throw them a curve. Because they're ready for it.

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