The familiar urge from your math teacher every year in middle and high school…SHOW YOUR WORK!
Every student I know fights against showing every step. “Why do I need to?! It’s obvious!”
Perhaps the reason we don’t want to show our work is that we don’t understand just how valuable it can be. Not just in math, either – in music as well.
- Showing your work as a student helps your teacher to target assistance to help you get better faster at the skill you’re building.
- Showing your work helps you go back and find errors easily. If you skip steps, it can be a lot harder.
- Showing your work is crucial to clear communication – sometimes when you understand something well, you can skip from step 1 to step 3 to step 6 to the conclusion – leaving the people you’re trying to communicate with feeling lost.
- Showing your work as you build a skill can encourage others behind you. Seeing only the finished product, it can be easy to think that someone was just born talented. But if you show your work, you allow others to understand the effort it takes to build skills.
- We urge our performing students to “make it look easy” – and that’s true. But we also have to show our work to our audience. Signal to them the hard work we’ve done to prepare our performance.
Are you reminding your students to show their work? Are they fighting it? If so, maybe you just haven’t explained the reasoning well enough.