teaching

Teaching is Hard. But You'll Get Better At It.

Teaching is difficult.

Yet, like all skills, it gets easier with purposeful practice over time.

Your first lesson is going to suck.

And, because you're your own greatest critic, it will play out in your head far worse than it actually was.

But here's the good news:

That's the worst you're ever going to be.

It's all uphill from then on. With some dips now and then, when you're testing out new material, delivery styles, methods, etc.

So, bite that bullet, make that first foray, rip off that band-aid, and make it your best worst performance.

You'll be much better than you thought you taught.

Do Expertise and Experience Sometimes Make You Slow to Change?

The more expertise you have in a subject, the more likely you are to try and ride out a drastic change caused by new contrary / negative information.

It's a good thing to trust your experience and wisdom. It makes you more confident and can greatly improve your competence.

The trouble is, it can also make you very attached to the way you've been doing things.

And when the world changes as fast as it does today, this can lead to problems.

I'm certainly guilty of relying more on my experience than listening to the "signs" around me.

When the pandemic hit, I was reluctant to transit my teaching online because:

a) I had spent months prior to the pandemic, producing my programmes.

These were science-based and centered around a lot of guided experiments and activities.

Not that much "lecturing", as they were aimed at students who were less inclined to sit and listen. So, how was I going to let them do the activities while I'm not present to moderate the flow and give guidance?

If this was a "soft skills" programme, I can modify it easily. But a science-based one?

That would take a lot of work and be nowhere nearly as effective or engaging.

My education partners agreed with my assessment.

b) I had spent 15 years as a trainer, all of it face-to-face.

To have to start messing around with lights and cameras and being unable to read my learners' body language properly (because webcams were, and still are, terrible at their job) seemed so much trouble.

I had spent so much time honing my live presentations that I never spent any time learning to do it virtually, and the notion of doing it scared me.

If I'm honest, point (b) was more of a barrier to me than (a). I could choose to invest another few months changing the curriculum (and I kind of did eventually), but the fear of change was so strong, it paralysed my thinking and, consequently, my actions.

And, as the pandemic raged on, the income loss added to the paralysis. Not just for me, but for a lot of trainers I knew and for a lot of education companies as well.

It's a lesson well-learned.

Trying to get to a point where I'm comfortable running online programmes took me time (partly due also to the fact that I'm a bit of laggard when it comes to technology - certainly not an early adopter).

It also took some useful gadgets and apps, which I'll be glad to share information on in a future post.

I'm still nowhere as proficient in online teaching as I am face-to-face, but I'm trying to get there.

Teaching in Schools, Showcases, Elective Modules. All That Jazz.

There's something I really enjoy about running education programmes in schools - Showcases.

This typically happens at the end of Elective Modules (where students get to pick a topic they’re interested in that the school has invited trainers to come in and train on).

Examples of Elective Modules (EMs) have included aeronautical engineering, automotive engineering, coding and programming, fashion design, barista skills, health science and healthcare, life sciences, and so on.

There are a few schools that seem rather opposed to the idea of Showcases for some reason, but I’ve always found them to be one of the most valuable parts of running an education programme.

What better way to learn than to teach someone else what you’ve learned?

Of course, due to pandemic, Showcases are pretty scaled down now. At most, they are restricted to their individual rooms, and only the teachers and other school leaders go from room to room.

The experience is, undoubtedly, diminished, but I maintain that it's better to have a lesser experience than nothing at all.

I Successfully Conducted my First Online Workshop on Conducting Workshops

On 16 July 2021, I successfully conducted a mini-workshop online.

This was for a group of individuals, all experts in their own fields, who wanted to learn how they can conduct their own workshops.

As they weren’t educators themselves, they weren’t sure about how to go about it “properly” - where to start, what to say, what to do.

And I quickly assured them that there wasn’t one “proper” way to do it. It all depends on where they are starting from and what they are trying to accomplish.

Because they already have valuable experience and knowledge, getting them to come up with something to run a workshop on wasn’t difficult.

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Once we got the topic and sub-topics settled, I taught them the 3 most important parts of running a workshop:

1) Preparation

2) Opening

3) Closing

I firmly believe that the best way to alleviate anxiety and feel confident is to be as prepared as possible, making the correct types of preparation.

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To help the participants of the mini-workshop, I prepared a set of templates and scripts for them for each of the 3 parts.

We briefly talked about the Delivery of the content, during which I told them that they don’t need to feel like they have to speak like a world-class speaker because:

a) They are not giving a speech.

b) In teaching, well-prepared content is way more important than delivery skills.

We rounded off the session with Questions, and they asked some really interesting ones, like “How do I engage a bored participant?” and “How should I structure a workshop to sell my services?”

We took about 30 minutes to go through all the questions before we ended.

Based on their feedback, they learned a lot of useful tips and were particularly grateful for the templates and scripts.

I intend to run at least one more round of this mini-workshop - I just need to set a date and get it going!

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