Recently, I learned about a classic teaching strategy in the world of medical education: watch one, do one, teach one.
Usually (and worryingly?) applied to surgeries, the premise is that the best way to learn a new surgical technique or method is to watch someone else do it, then do it yourself, and then, finally, teach it to someone else.
In considering how this strategy applies to me, in my role as an A/E/C marketer, I realized that only rarely is this strategy a natural part of my own “learning cycle.” Too often, I find myself scrambling at the first step—unable to watch one, unable, essentially, to find someone out there doing exactly the same thing that I need to learn. (For example, how do I retain paragraph styles from Word when I import into InDesign?!) The latter two steps are more straightforward: do one, of course, is unavoidable (can’t watch one forever!), and teach one is made easier by working alongside a younger colleague who affords an opportunity for teaching.
I’ve found, though, that the often missing initial step of watch one has troubling implications down through the line. After all, the watch one equivalent of a YouTube video or HowToGeek article about how to load custom Word templates onto your C Drive just isn’t the same watch one as looking over the shoulder of a colleague or peer as they walk you through the process. And that’s to say nothing of how much time I spend “interpreting,” analyzing how a technique or process or strategy might best be amended to fit my specific needs.
This ongoing struggle is the reason I’ve spent more time in the past few weeks than ever before on my watch one, do one, teach one process. Besides spending more time up front on the learning—choosing to drill down and understand the workings of an Excel function rather than treat it as no more than a nifty tool grabbed off the Internet—I’m also trying to be more intentional about the teach one aspect.
To that end, I’ve begun to use a quirk of Microsoft Teams that I discovered a few months ago. Recognizing that you can both record meetings within Teams and have a “meeting” with only myself, I saw an opportunity to very quickly create “how to” videos (technically, recordings of meetings with myself) that were automatically uploaded onto OneDrive. And, presto! A library of “how to” videos that I can easily share—teach one—but even use myself, once I (inevitably) forget how I did that cool thing in Excel.
Taylor Coe 