I taught my daughter to swim after well over a year's worth of "professional" swim training had seemingly achieved very little.

The approach I used worked well. I tried to teach her one skill at a time - like the Montessori method.

Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown.

So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest. Her first task was to work out how to move around. Because of the floating vest she did not have to worry about keeping afloat. Because of the flippers she found learning to get around by kicking quite easy.

I progressively let down the vest over a period of a few visits. She progressively learned to leverage her "getting around" skills into "staying afloat" skills.

I then showed her how to swim in various styles ie dog paddling, breast stroke, then freestyle with head out of the water, then freestyle with proper breathing.

Eventually we took off the flippers and after a short adjustment, she could swim! All in less than a month. It was amazing to see after all those swimming lessons.

I would love to find a similar way to teach riding a bicycle. You can easily take learning to pedal offline. Steering plus balancing seem to be tightly coupled though, and the way you have to turn is very unintuitive thus hard to learn.

Teaching requires that you take all your implicit procedural knowledge and turn it into explicit declarative knowledge. In effect you have to reverse-engineer your skill.

When I was teaching my daughter French, she said "French is so dumb - why do they have all those irregular verbs?". So I took her through a few irregular English verbs. She had learned them all without explicitly realizing the fact that many common English verbs are irregular.