Tips for Teaching Technical Concepts
Lessons learned from many mistakes
Occasionally, people who are interested in teaching will reach out to me for advice on how to structure their content. Below are four key rules that I often like to share.
Four Key Rules:
Cover less than you think you need to.
Go so slowly that you’re worried you’ll get negative feedback about pace.
Time spent answering questions is worth 2x time on pre-planned lecture.
Work in more jokes. You’re teaching new technical information. Lighten it up.
Expanded Comments:
Rule 1: Following rules 2-4 relies on me having time. This makes rule 1 the most important. Part of me having time comes from cutting any material that I do not think is mission-critical to get through. Realistically, it also requires me to cut quite a bit that feels mission critical to me when I am first designing the lesson plan.
There can be real pressure on people teaching technical topics to teach at the top of their license. You want to show people why they should learn from you. A problem is that a curriculum can move from teaching someone something new towards existing to showing someone how knowledgeable and credible you are. Remember, the curriculum is about the student and not the teacher.
When I started teaching martial arts, I felt immense pressure to show everyone why I ran the classes. That often caused me to try to teach as much as I knew about a given topic, rather than focusing on what is most critical for students to know.
These days, I have an extremely high bar as to if it really needs to be included. The majority of the time I spend designing a curriculum is focused on cutting, not adding.
Rule 2: If I can get someone to really get 2 - 3 topics over 90 minutes, I will take that over rapid firing 10 - 15 topics. You may feel like you’re doing less initially, but the long term value to the students is so much higher.
At the end of the day, the goal is to arm students with information that they can use. A bunch of extremely high level content covered quickly feels informative during the lecture, but does not tend to stick.
Rule 3: Answering questions is partially about ensuring clarity, but it is also about showing that you care and making students feel heard. Additionally, answering questions lets me gauge if what I am saying is actually hitting or not. If I get a bunch of questions that imply to me that what I just said went over the group’s head, that is a great sign to re-cover what I just went through and consider adjusting the content.
One of the ways I judge how well I did in a seminar was how many questions I received. No questions means I probably need to go back to the drawing board.
Rule 4: In terms of jokes, it is critical to remember that you are teaching some dense, technical, and probably a bit intimidating to the people you are training. A key goal is keeping people engaged enough to retain the information your teaching them.
To be clear, I am not suggesting you turn every seminar into a standup set. Little things like giving unique names in your examples, mixing in a few funny anecdotes, and occasionally poking fun at yourself are often more than enough.
Closing Thoughts: There is a lot more that I can say about rules and guidelines I use when teaching and designing curriculums. That said, to stay true to the rules laid out above, I will stop at just these four for now. In later posts I may add more rules. I hope you enjoyed reading!