Consider a doctor: it is her role to use perceived patient symptoms as input, and produce a medical diagnosis and course of treatment as output.

How should one best teach this skill?

It seems to me that a circular approach is best. The student should engage in what I’ll call “watching”, “listening”, and “doing” in a cyclical process.

By watching — I mean the act of watching or observing someone with greater proficiency perform the same task. To use the medical school example — one could observe an experienced doctor do patient intake, wherein the learner would implicitly infer useful behaviors.

Afterwards, the student ought to supplement this “watching” with “listening.” By this, I mean exposure to an organized and abstracted synthesis of principles and skills recently witnessed in the “watching”. That is, if a doctor surmises the patient has the flu, in the “listening” stage, that doctor (or another suitable instructor) would delineate the key considerations of the previous case. For example, the doctor might say that the patient’s persistent dry cough, combined with the doctor’s knowledge of present regional flu prevalence, led to his flu prognosis. The teacher, in this case, points out abstract principles that are believed to be important (in this case “patient coughing” and “knowledge of regional health patterns”).

After watching and listening, the learner should do. That is, he should attempt the execution of the skill.

These three processes make up a large component of the teaching we do at Choate. Some questions I have though:

  1. Where should one start in this process, from an ideal pedagogical standpoint? Doing? Watching? Listening? Where do most Choate teachers typically start this process?
  2. What is the distribution of time given to each of these phases here at Choate? In your teaching, do students spend most time watching? Listening? Doing? What is the ideal distribution? 1/3 each?
  3. Am I missing any components to this cyclical model of learning?