Repetition without differentiation is merely an illusion of progress. Repetition is a good way to fake teaching. The best way to become a better teacher is to practice differentiating within repetition. For each repetition of a short teaching session, repeat the main point, but with slight differentiation (e.g. example, or order of explanation, or conciseness) that forces you to think harder about how to express it. Otherwise, your lessons will be just rehearsing the same script you say to different people instead of practicing a different delivery that works for different situations. Start with an idea to teach and plan to teach it twice within one short teaching session. First, tell it simply (and don’t worry if it feels like it’s missing some details).
Then, have students work through a brief exercise related to it. After that (e.g., after the exercise time is up or after they raise their hands saying they’ve figured it out), tell them the same thing but with one difference: If you were using abstract examples in your first explanation, use concrete examples now. If you gave a longer instruction, now try to reduce it to one sentence. Then have them work through a second exercise. This will reveal more clearly which of the two is better at helping people understand. Instead of trying to explain your idea better from scratch the first time around and hoping it helps, you can tell immediately which version is better by observing how students react. One of the most common problems I see instructors run into while teaching is that they try to optimize everything at once. As such, they can’t tell what made one iteration better than another.
To get around this, only change one thing in each repetition of a lesson. E.g., if they didn’t know how to get started, only focus on how your initial instructions are structured; if they were getting confused while trying to do the first exercise, keep the example the same but change how the initial instructions are delivered to the group (e.g. longer or shorter). Then repeat the exercise. This will help you learn from each repetition. The point of this exercise isn’t to get the ideal delivery right the first time. Rather, it’s to iterate on an explanation until it becomes clearer and more effective at helping people learn. You can do this daily. Spend 5 minutes thinking up one explanation and picking an example to go with it.
Spend 3 minutes trying that same explanation again, keeping everything else the same, except change that one thing that you think might help the most. This routine will train you to differentiate within your teaching to make sure it becomes a skill rather than just rote practice. You’ll quickly pick up on what is working for you (and what is not) and will eventually be able to predict what might help the most without needing a practice routine. When you’re feeling stuck, you need to force yourself to think differently. This is what happens when you’ve told an idea so many times that you feel it’s so well established and familiar to you that you don’t think about how to say it differently from day to day; you know the information by heart already.
That doesn’t mean you can say it easily to others in new ways. Challenge yourself to say the same thing to another group of people, only use fewer words this time or describe the same thing using a different medium. Try drawing it. Try telling a metaphor or analogy for it. The challenge should force you to build the idea in your head and figure out what else is holding you back. You’ll notice it gets easier to explain it as long as you can say the idea clearly, using a different approach. Repetition helps us build confidence. The purpose of repetition is not to practice being perfect but to practice being flexible. When you can repeat your explanation a few times, while still being confident, it means your teaching will become more flexible, and will be able to adapt to new situations.
It will be able to respond to new questions, to new time frames, and new readiness levels. As you do this more and more, you can see that teaching your ideas to others, even those who have never seen them before, isn’t just saying the same thing a few times. It’s a series of choices: which example to use, which order to introduce concepts, how concise your instructions are, and how clear the analogy. Your next lesson should build on your previous lesson, using the same framework, to improve your ability to communicate clearly and accurately.