Teaching something is the best way to learn

Teaching something is the best way to learn that thing. A person requires to have understanding to be able to tell someone else how to do something. This is especially true when the person learning the new skill might ask questions. One of the learning strategies we encourage at Puppet Maths is to ask our pupils to explain what they have learnt to others. These might be their friends, or their parents. Parents are often indulgent and don 't press their children and test their understanding, this is a mistake. It should not be seen as a weakness or a failure if the child cannot answer such searching questions, but as an opportunity for the child to learn more, to address those points on which they are not confident. By this means, asking pertanent questions stretches the pupils but does not humiliate them. It makes them face those parts of the subject that they don't know as well as they might, and thereby overcome their weaknesses. It also teaches the value of standing back and getting an overview of what you're learing, rather than getting bogged down in the detail. So very often pupils make heavy weather of something that is simple because instead of looking at the principle of what they are doing they are too busy concentrating on the detailed mechanism of doing it. They fail to see the wood because of the trees. Making the pupils teach what they've learnt gets them to analyse the concepts that they're using and fixes those concepts in their minds.