I’ve been thinking a bit about teaching and learning lately. Since I started my current day job, I’ve learned quite a bit. Most of that learning has come from one particular coworker who is excellent at explaining things in ways that make sense to me and encourages me to keep learning by highlighting the things I do well. That’s exactly how I learn best and explains why I’ve learned almost nothing from another coworker who is relentlessly negative, criticizes excessively without ever giving compliments, and only explains things in ways that make sense to him. As such, I wanted to share some things I’ve picked up from teaching people about juggling, unicycling, and other fun, random stuff. Without further ado, here are my tips for teaching.
- Make learning fun. This is perhaps the most important point on this list. Someone who doesn’t enjoy what they’re learning is extremely unlikely to continue with it. In contrast, someone who has a blast with the process will stick with it for a long time. I’ve learned a bit about spreadsheets just by playing around with them and looking up how to do particular tasks when I can’t figure it out on my own. In addition to being fun, that has taught me more about spreadsheets than I’d have learned had I treated it as a chore or been pressured by somebody else to learn how to use them. While some subjects may be more inherently enjoyable than others, any subject can be made interesting by someone who knows how to inject fun into the process.
- Teach a bit at a time. There are students of every subject under the sun who’ve studied it their whole lives and are still learning new things about it all the time. As such, it’s important to go slowly to avoid overwhelming students with far more information than they can handle. A few new things learned each day will add up over time to a huge mountain of knowledge.
- Encourage, encourage, encourage. Learning new things can be difficult and stressful. Why make it worse by discouraging someone and only focusing on the mistakes they make? Instead, focus on their successes and celebrate with them. It helps to point out how far they’ve come, especially if you’ve worked with them for a good while and have seen lots of progress. You might see progress they’ve missed, so be sure to point it out so that they can feel encouraged enough to stick with it rather than quitting during the difficult times.
- Be gentle. Criticism is one of the most difficult things to properly give. Some folks, including me, have a hard time handling criticism in general. Even those who can better receive it still can only take so much before giving up. Accordingly, point out what someone is doing well before gingerly focusing on areas for improvement. Additionally, you can use an accusation audit to soften the pain of criticism and make it effective for improvement rather than counterproductive. I’ve said before on this blog that being gentler with my dog Sawyer than almost anybody else in the family is what endeared him so much to me. As with animals, so with humans.
- Let them figure out some things on their own. Clearly, this is only to be done some of the time. If this were done all the time, then there’d be no need for anybody to teach anybody else anything. That being said, anything that you learn for yourself will stick with you much longer and much deeper than something someone else tells you. I like to think of this as giving somebody two plus two and letting them add it up rather than simply telling them the answer.