Re-Teaching to Enchance Knowledge

I'm writing a blog for my e-Learning Concepts class and I figure I may as well copy over my blogs from there to here to keep a full record. You may find this interesting.

I find it interesting that none of the teaching techniques taught in instructional design mention re-teaching material as a form of learning. If that sentence sounded confusing, let me digress… After two years of playing ultimate Frisbee I decided to start my own team at college where there wasn’t a team established. So naturally I was responsible for being the captain and teaching new players how to play the sport. With only two years of experience, I wasn’t very good to say the least, however when I was training my team basic and advanced styles and techniques my personal skills started to explode and I believe I became a better player myself from teaching what I knew. As a second example to my claim, when I was taking the Intro to Authoring (Adobe Flash) class in the IIT program, I was frequently asked to help fellow classmates with their work, debugging their code and reciting the previous class’s lessons. I’m not sure how I was initially chosen by my classmates but after repeatedly asked to help I became considerably proficient in Flash. I have not thought of a practical application of using re-teaching as an eLearning technique, especially if there are time constraints. From my personal experience, I have found that the skills I have mastered in the past have all had a history of me teaching someone else the skill. I’m curious what other people may think of this, specifically from people who have been in a position of training/teaching (professors, coaches, mentors).
~Robert Rathgeber