You Don’t Need a Million Different Explanations
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Some people think that students need a million different explanations of the same topic until one “clicks” for them.
But really, if you have to explain something a ton of different ways to a student before it they can follow that explanation well enough to successfully engage in active problem-solving, then either
- your original explanations were not good in a pedagogical sense, or
- the student was lacking prerequisite knowledge and the explanation that "clicked" managed to circumvent that prerequisite knowledge (which often indicates that it's reducing the topic to a simpler case that doesn't involve the prerequisite -- which means the curriculum is watered down and the student will only be able to solve cherry-picked problems).
When you have
- highly scaffolded, carefully curated content,
- that has been battle-tested over a large number of students,
- and continually analyzed to detect and further scaffold any areas where more than a sliver of students fall off the rails,
- and has gotten to a point that 95% of students pass lessons on the first try (and 99% within two tries),
if you give a lesson to a new student who has mastered all the prerequisite material, then there’s really no excuse for them not to be able to learn it.
For lessons that have undergone this much data-driven refining, on the rare occasion that a student does struggle with it, it doesn’t mean that the lesson needs to explain things in a different way.
Usually, all it takes to rebound is a bit of rest and a fresh pair of eyes. And then the same exact content will “click” the next time around.
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