How To Teach

Tweet

Last night, I was having dinner with some of my DDD colleagues. The three of us are all expats, educated in and with work experience from the Western world, but currently working in Laos. While we work in very different roles, a large part of all of our jobs is to build capacity with the local staff.

Last night, I was having dinner with some of my DDD colleagues. The three of us are all expats, educated in and with work experience from the Western world, but currently working in Laos. While we work in very different roles, a large part of all of our jobs is to build capacity with the local staff.

We are introducing a new business service to the staff in our Vientiane office, and the question of how to most effectively teach someone something new was what, along with falafel sandwiches and Beerlao, was on the table last night. When exploring a new business service, you of course first have to go through research, development, testing, adjusting, trial, and more adjusting. But, once you have a blueprint, a map – how do you teach other people how to read the map?

When I was a kid, I had a very hard time learning how to read. When in the fourth grade, I could still only read a few sentences at a time, and not with great success. Because I grew up in a Denmark where solidarity and equality are predominant pedagogical principles, my teacher decided that my entire class needed to go through a four-week intensive reading course, so that I could catch up. One of the things that stuck with me from the introduction she gave to the course was that no one ever was able to figure out how children actually learn to read.

While I now know that her statement at least in part was designed to make me feel better, it is also true that there has been great debate about and many different theories on how learning happens.

I asked two of our Operations Managers, Bunhoeut in Cambodia and Amita in Laos, how they approach the challenge of teaching their data-entry operators a new workflow.

Bunhoeut makes three points:

• First you have to show the person the output, the final result, of the process.
• Then you have to show the person how the process works.
• Finally, you must develop clear instructions that include quality metrics.

Amita agrees, but adds a few pieces:

• You have to specify the tools needed.
• You must conduct training and have people practice.
• You should keep an open feedback loop and evaluate progress even after the work has started.

Between the two of them, they reach the same conclusion as we did last night: The key is to reach a saturation point.
For those four weeks in fourth grade I went through book after book after book, and suddenly it was there: I was reading a book. So here’s our best guess: If you provide information through enough channels and repeat it enough times, eventually the knowledge will transfer and you’ve taught someone something new.