I suspect this highlights are more serious issue which is that most of our training methods are not adaptive. They work well only if the students arrives at the right phase in their understanding and otherwise make poor use of everyone's time. Yet assuming the student has something to learn, and the teacher knows about it, this does not have to be the case.
One discussion of training I found eye opening was Pat McNamara's thoughts on what I believe he said was called "skills-based training" versus "performance-based training". With skills-based training, instructor start out the training session with the idea in mind to cover certain skills. A lesson is successful if it covers the skills the instructor wanted to cover. Performance-based training is geared towards improving the students' performance, so skills are introduced based on the students' actual level of ability and the relevance of training in a particular skill for improving their performance.
One motivation for adopting performance-based training is the lack of success of skills-based training in many contexts. Why is skills-based training sometimes unsuccessful? One reason is that the skills may be too hard -- the instructor chooses the skills with imperfect information on the students' level, and they choose the wrong skills. The students receive the training but their abilities do not actually improve; they don't know what's going on. Another reason can be that the skills are too easy -- the students receive the training and actually meet all the standards, but it doesn't actually help them get better.
Pat McNamara discusses these concepts in the context of being a shooting instructor for police departments and military units. It seems that one often doesn't know what these units know before one shows up, and the officers and soldiers in any one unit can be quite different individually, so the instructor has frequent occasion to think about the relationship between what they planned to teach and what they actually did when prompted by the students' questions and challenges.
One discussion of training I found eye opening was Pat McNamara's thoughts on what I believe he said was called "skills-based training" versus "performance-based training". With skills-based training, instructor start out the training session with the idea in mind to cover certain skills. A lesson is successful if it covers the skills the instructor wanted to cover. Performance-based training is geared towards improving the students' performance, so skills are introduced based on the students' actual level of ability and the relevance of training in a particular skill for improving their performance.
One motivation for adopting performance-based training is the lack of success of skills-based training in many contexts. Why is skills-based training sometimes unsuccessful? One reason is that the skills may be too hard -- the instructor chooses the skills with imperfect information on the students' level, and they choose the wrong skills. The students receive the training but their abilities do not actually improve; they don't know what's going on. Another reason can be that the skills are too easy -- the students receive the training and actually meet all the standards, but it doesn't actually help them get better.
Pat McNamara discusses these concepts in the context of being a shooting instructor for police departments and military units. It seems that one often doesn't know what these units know before one shows up, and the officers and soldiers in any one unit can be quite different individually, so the instructor has frequent occasion to think about the relationship between what they planned to teach and what they actually did when prompted by the students' questions and challenges.