The Skillful Teacher

Teacher Demonstration or Student Experimentation
When helping students to acquire, and then apply, specific skills,
teachers often spend considerable time demonstrating the required
skills to students with the intent that students will then learn by
imitating this performance. In this approach complicated intellec-
tual and instrumental procedures are broken down into an incre-
mental sequence of discrete steps, and teachers demonstrate how to
perform these expertly at each stage of skill development. This is
an approach I have used when teaching in such different contexts
as little league soccer, recreational guitar, or when explaining how
to undertake a critical analysis of literature in a Harvard graduate
seminar. In the early stages of learning, providing this kind of scaf-
folding is important to students who appreciate having a clear image
of what they are being expected to do. Demonstration as a teach-
ing approach has the additional advantage of teachers modeling
their own participation in, and commitment to, the learning activ-
ities they are asking of students. Given that students need to feel
they are in the presence of a teacher who knows what she is doing,
demonstration also helps build the kind of teacher credibility dis-
cussed in Chapter Four.
Teaching in Diverse Classrooms
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Problems arise, however, when the demonstration approach is
emphasized so much that it allows the student little chance to try
out the skills she is observing. An exemplary demonstration of skill
early on in a course can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand
it can provide a model of excellence that students may well find
inspirational and to which they can aspire. On the other hand it
can also be an off-putting display, a dazzling performance so appar-
ently flawless that it ends up intimidating, rather than encouraging,
students’ desire to learn. Things are complicated further by the fact
that different students in the same classroom may have these two
different reactions to the same act of demonstration. If demonstra-
tions are going to be used in teaching, then they are best conducted
early on in a new learning sequence, before students have the
chance to integrate bad habits into their skills repertoire. As with
all other teaching approaches, they should also be monitored con-
tinuously through such mechanisms as the CIQ.