017 Refresh
Our Educator Empowerment Program (EEP) 6R Training System involves six steps, obviously—Read, Reflect, Reinforce, Relate, Render and Reflect. And as important the first five are to the training process, I feel that the last—refresh—as the one that requires much attention.
The first three (read, reflect, reinforce) can easily be done by the teacher trainee, independently even, and the succeeding training session would reveal whether or not the teacher did accomplish these pre-session tasks.
The next two (relate, render) can be easily monitored by the school, ensuring active participation of all teacher trainees both in terms of the training session with colleagues (relate) and in terms of applying what has been learned during training to their respective classes (render).
The sixth and last (refresh) requires more effort, as far as both the training coordinators and trainees are concerned.
This I’ve observed in my visits to some of our EEP beneficiary schools, wherein a few schools were in a hurry to move on to the next lesson and failing to spend more time with refreshing the teachers’ knowledge and appreciation of what has been previously discussed.
I blame that on our schools’ tendency to worry too much about completing prescribed workloads—including the academic curriculum. I’m assuming that teachers think that since they’ve tackled a particular topic, students have been assessed (and they fared fairly well), they can move on to the next topic already (since, after all, there’s really so much to cover with little time left in the school year).
However, to ensure that our students learn—whether they be teachers in training or kids in the classroom—we must make teaching and learning an iterative process. Otherwise, if the teacher crams everything in one go, even if the students (or trainees) appear to have understood the lesson, they would most likely not have a deep understanding or recall to make the learning stick.
So whether or not you believe you need 10,000 hours to master something, there’s a lot of value in iteration in learning. And that’s why you need to refresh your understanding of the lesson, whether it’s for your teacher trainee or your students in your K-12 classroom.
Think of it as gaining muscle memory from having to practice the scales and playing “Chopsticks” on the piano. Yes, they’re simple and easy to do. But no, you won’t get to master these basic tasks if you don’t play them often.
If you don’t refresh, you become rusty. You forget. And you can’t take on more difficult learning tasks.
Teachers must understand the value of iteration. In training. And in teaching in their respective classes.
They should always find time to refresh on what has been learned.