People call me an excellent teacher, and I’ve probably spent more time figuring out why people think I’m an excellent teacher than I have getting better at teaching. Some techniques I find universally applicable:
Teach yourself.
Imagine yourself knowing everything you now know minus the thing that needs to be taught and everything that requires that knowledge as a prerequisite. Now picture trying to teach yourself. Humans are terrible at remembering when they learned something, how long it took them, what it felt like and where they had problems, etc. By starting with the idea of how you would teach yourself, you’re focusing on what you would absolutely NEED to tell ANYONE regardless of their prior knowledge or understanding; these are good things to focus on. Just as importantly, you also prime your brain to think about the subject on a less automatic level.
Metaphors are absolutely critical.
Everyday human experience seems to very far more within people’s minds than it does on the outside. Give concrete examples from the physical world as metaphors: the internet is not a big truck, it’s a series of tubes! It might be funny, but it made at least as much sense as anything else in the speech.
Talk a LOT.
Throw out a lot of information and your student will tend to latch onto the one thing that they were missing and ask about it, leading to a breakthrough. When you make an important point, repeat it a second or third time in different ways, then explicitly point it out later during examples. When the student is actually attempting something that requires a great deal on concentration, be absolutely silent unless they need a nudge; otherwise, avoid ever letting the room be silent for more than five seconds. This doesn’t mean rush through your explanations, it means belabor the point and add more metaphors if possible. It also means build a habit in your student of talking about his thought process so you can gauge what to say next and when it’s appropriate to move on.
Prime the mind to recognize.
Try to employ a fixed set of terms, even if you have to make it up on the spot, so that you can immediately point it out later and the student will know what you’re trying to point out. If you sum up a conceptual explanation by calling it “ordered complexity”, you can then point it out later, “see, that’s what I meant by ordered complexity!” This will pull the entire explanation into their thought process the moment that it’s needed.
If all else fails, give up and go back to basics.
If it seems like you’re not making progress for a while—if they simply don’t “get it”—you’ve usually incorrectly assumed that the student has a prerequisite level of skill or knowledge. Stop immediately and trace back to prerequisites that are most likely to not be met, do some trouble-shooting to find the biggest culprit, and start a new lesson in the trouble spot. Resist the urge to do a quick-fix bare-bones lesson to get them up to speed so you can return to the original lesson; you must endeavor to genuinely teach them the more basic knowledge/skill, or you will just waste your time later.
I’ve talked a lot about here about the failure of others to explain, and I have to agree with 1 and 5 but not the others. 5 in particular I’ve taken to calling the “method of nepocu tracing”. (nepocu = nearest point of common understanding). Basically, fall back to the level of pre-requisite understanding, fix their shortcomings there, and then build off of it.
Likewise, most bad explanations I’ve seen seem to make no attempt to think about what it was like to learn a concept, and what key impediment stood in the way of understanding. (Some egregious self-promotion on what understanding means.)
I mainly don’t agree with 3) -- every bad explanation I’ve heard is characterized by talking continuously without checking for whether you’ve met 5) and 1).
People call me an excellent teacher, and I’ve probably spent more time figuring out why people think I’m an excellent teacher than I have getting better at teaching. Some techniques I find universally applicable:
Teach yourself. Imagine yourself knowing everything you now know minus the thing that needs to be taught and everything that requires that knowledge as a prerequisite. Now picture trying to teach yourself. Humans are terrible at remembering when they learned something, how long it took them, what it felt like and where they had problems, etc. By starting with the idea of how you would teach yourself, you’re focusing on what you would absolutely NEED to tell ANYONE regardless of their prior knowledge or understanding; these are good things to focus on. Just as importantly, you also prime your brain to think about the subject on a less automatic level.
Metaphors are absolutely critical. Everyday human experience seems to very far more within people’s minds than it does on the outside. Give concrete examples from the physical world as metaphors: the internet is not a big truck, it’s a series of tubes! It might be funny, but it made at least as much sense as anything else in the speech.
Talk a LOT. Throw out a lot of information and your student will tend to latch onto the one thing that they were missing and ask about it, leading to a breakthrough. When you make an important point, repeat it a second or third time in different ways, then explicitly point it out later during examples. When the student is actually attempting something that requires a great deal on concentration, be absolutely silent unless they need a nudge; otherwise, avoid ever letting the room be silent for more than five seconds. This doesn’t mean rush through your explanations, it means belabor the point and add more metaphors if possible. It also means build a habit in your student of talking about his thought process so you can gauge what to say next and when it’s appropriate to move on.
Prime the mind to recognize. Try to employ a fixed set of terms, even if you have to make it up on the spot, so that you can immediately point it out later and the student will know what you’re trying to point out. If you sum up a conceptual explanation by calling it “ordered complexity”, you can then point it out later, “see, that’s what I meant by ordered complexity!” This will pull the entire explanation into their thought process the moment that it’s needed.
If all else fails, give up and go back to basics. If it seems like you’re not making progress for a while—if they simply don’t “get it”—you’ve usually incorrectly assumed that the student has a prerequisite level of skill or knowledge. Stop immediately and trace back to prerequisites that are most likely to not be met, do some trouble-shooting to find the biggest culprit, and start a new lesson in the trouble spot. Resist the urge to do a quick-fix bare-bones lesson to get them up to speed so you can return to the original lesson; you must endeavor to genuinely teach them the more basic knowledge/skill, or you will just waste your time later.
I’ve talked a lot about here about the failure of others to explain, and I have to agree with 1 and 5 but not the others. 5 in particular I’ve taken to calling the “method of nepocu tracing”. (nepocu = nearest point of common understanding). Basically, fall back to the level of pre-requisite understanding, fix their shortcomings there, and then build off of it.
Likewise, most bad explanations I’ve seen seem to make no attempt to think about what it was like to learn a concept, and what key impediment stood in the way of understanding. (Some egregious self-promotion on what understanding means.)
I mainly don’t agree with 3) -- every bad explanation I’ve heard is characterized by talking continuously without checking for whether you’ve met 5) and 1).