Here’s the idea. Comments are not only welcome but coveted.

The sequence of learn one, do one, teach one is well known. The process seeks to shorten the path between study, practice, and understanding, if understanding is demonstrated at least in part by the ability to master an explanation and customize it (and a demonstration) to address new learners in an unpredictable learning situation. The process also propagates learning very rapidly, as each teacher helps to build many more teachers.

I’m thinking that learn one, do one, teach one describes not only three steps in a process, or even three modes of learning, but one high-level activity in which each mode or step must be present at every other step. The activity is characterized by attention and articulation (these concepts may also be distinct but not separate). The steps are distinguished by the relative proportion of attention and articulation vectors: what things am I attending to, and in what mixture? what is the nature of my articulation, and what is my audience?

Learning involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention, but at the same time the learner’s attention must be self-directed enough to engage in an ongoing re-articulation that responds to the teacher. The learner must “follow along,” and that involves at least in part a kind of auto-hypnosis that makes the lesson appear to be created by the attending self.

Doing involves a proportionally more intense vector of self-directed attention, along with an ongoing self-directed articulation that serves as a feedback loop monitoring progress toward the goal. At the same time, the doer’s attention must be other-directed enough to make that feedback loop truly critical and useful. That is, the doer must be ruthless in his or her self-critique, making the I into an other.

Teaching involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention in which the work is narrated. This narration also bootstraps the process into metacognitive areas in which students witness the teacher engaging his or her own zone of proximal development (acting as one’s own coach) and thus can learn how to access their own ZPDs themselves. This phase involves the most dynamic cognitive apprenticeship, on the part of teacher and learner.

All of that said, each of the steps must include some measure of the other to be effective. The learner must engage in a kind of self-education and re-articulation for the experience to be active and useful instead of passive and illusory. The doer, however much flow and automaticity he or she enjoys in the work, must have a feedback loop in there somewhere, and that loop is made out of attention vectors that are not obviously part of the doing. The teacher must have elements of self-directed learning and doing that are active during the other-directed articulation and narration.

If I haven’t vexed him beyond his patience, Bakhtin is hovering here somewhere.