I was a TA for a while and was taught to use Socratic methods. If people have some background knoweldge, you can get very far by asking people “what would happen in this situation? what about this situation? Now if you apply this situation back to this one, what happens?” It depends how much time you have, but lots of questioning interspersed with some explanations seemed to help most students the best.
If you are trying to teach someone, I think doing that is better than telling, because then when someone else has made the inferences it will become more a part of them and they will remember more.
However, doing this repeatedly is also good for learning to explain, because you learn all the different things that people get hung up on—what inferential steps are most difficult to make.
Note that if you want to be really good, you’ll have to do a LOT. After a year of 4 hours a week of face-to-face TAing, I was finally able to help people through most types of problems and had reached the ‘competent/actually helpful to most people’ stage.
Explaining things is also something where there are many paths to the same goal. Different explanations will work for different people. To be the best explainer, you’ll have to learn many different explanations. Read many viewpoints on transhumanism by different people and as you read them, try to think of how you would explain it to someone else. Build up a repertoire.
Try to taboo all the relevant vocabulary so that you are forced to think about what the words and concepts mean in more precise language.
Interesting that it it takes so long. I am reminded of SilasBarta’s claim that a lot of things that require lots of experience just require the right insights plus some practice.
It would be interesting to write down a bunch of student questions, and lists of questions from an experienced TA and a naive TA and then try to figure out how they differ.
The reason was probably that there was a large amount of material (the class included electricity, magnetism, circuits, and optics), so that I had to learn many different explanations. Each of these topics is a course by itself, and so and to explain things for an introductory course you often have to have a deeper level of knowledge. I hadn’t taken any classes other than the intro class, so acquiring the deeper explanations was a long process.
I was a TA for a while and was taught to use Socratic methods. If people have some background knoweldge, you can get very far by asking people “what would happen in this situation? what about this situation? Now if you apply this situation back to this one, what happens?” It depends how much time you have, but lots of questioning interspersed with some explanations seemed to help most students the best.
If you are trying to teach someone, I think doing that is better than telling, because then when someone else has made the inferences it will become more a part of them and they will remember more. However, doing this repeatedly is also good for learning to explain, because you learn all the different things that people get hung up on—what inferential steps are most difficult to make.
Note that if you want to be really good, you’ll have to do a LOT. After a year of 4 hours a week of face-to-face TAing, I was finally able to help people through most types of problems and had reached the ‘competent/actually helpful to most people’ stage.
Explaining things is also something where there are many paths to the same goal. Different explanations will work for different people. To be the best explainer, you’ll have to learn many different explanations. Read many viewpoints on transhumanism by different people and as you read them, try to think of how you would explain it to someone else. Build up a repertoire.
Try to taboo all the relevant vocabulary so that you are forced to think about what the words and concepts mean in more precise language.
Interesting that it it takes so long. I am reminded of SilasBarta’s claim that a lot of things that require lots of experience just require the right insights plus some practice.
It would be interesting to write down a bunch of student questions, and lists of questions from an experienced TA and a naive TA and then try to figure out how they differ.
The reason was probably that there was a large amount of material (the class included electricity, magnetism, circuits, and optics), so that I had to learn many different explanations. Each of these topics is a course by itself, and so and to explain things for an introductory course you often have to have a deeper level of knowledge. I hadn’t taken any classes other than the intro class, so acquiring the deeper explanations was a long process.