And I’m not referring to anything related to pageants.
When I’m teaching something new to my students, I first pre-test them to find out if they know how to do it. My pre-testing is accomplished by asking questions. Maybe a couple of them can answer my questions, but most of the time if it’s truly new material, they can’t. So I model or demostrate how to do it.
Some students grasp material right away, but most average students require a lot of repetition and additional models. Then there are students in special education programs that require additional support including multimodal input (learning through more than just visual and auditory – oftentimes it’s tactile: “let’s trace an ‘m’ on paper,”) or through cueing.
In my humble opinion, modeling is teaching and the basis of learning is through imitation. To imitate well a student needs to have adequate attention and memory.
I believe schools can learn how to “model” good food. Many students get either bad models or no models at home in regards to nutrition. So they come to school to learn not only reading and math, but also basic life skills that their parents aren’t teaching (or aren’t able to teach) them at home.
I hate to add something else to the full plate (pun intended) that schools already have, but school lunches are important. Executive functions like attention and memory are supported by good nutrition. Let’s teach kids what they should eat at lunch by modeling good food and giving them the best we can offer.