Andrew L. Van Slaars

I was observing a programming class one time and as the instructor walked the students through an exercise in the book, they hit a snag. Something wasn’t right, the error message was pretty vague and it was about mid way through the class, so the instructor gave the students a break.

I’ve been in situations like this teaching my own classes and sometimes you need a few minutes to work things out. Giving the students a break while troubleshooting allows you to be a little more relaxed than if everybody is watching and impatiently waiting.

The story takes an ugly turn at the end of the break. When the students returned, the instructor moved right into the next exercise. No explanation. No admission of a mistake. Nothing. Eventually, one of the students asked what had happened. He blamed the book’s authors for not testing their code and moved on.

Now, if you don’t see a problem with this, imagine that you are paying tuition for the treatment mentioned above. You just spent two hours on an exercise and saw no reward and learned nothing from it.

If you still don’t see a problem with it, contact me and I’ll tell you where you can mail your tuition checks :). Ok, let’s get back on track…

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Teaching training

When I first started working as a technical trainer, I was 22 years old. I did my training at a community college and taught continuing education classes to adult professionals. My average student was at least 10 years older than me and most of them had been working longer than I had been out of high school. Needless to say, I had to work pretty hard just to convince my students that I was worth listening to.

My initial approach was to teach all of the course material as quickly as possible. Once they got the point that I actually knew what I was talking about, I started over and went at a slower pace.

As it turns out, this approach helped the students retain more information. While it didn’t seem that anybody retained or understood the material on the first pass, almost nothing was new on the second pass. The inherent repetition in this approach helped students learn more than they would have otherwise.
Looking back on my time in the military, I realized that they do the same thing. The military is known for relatively fast training. They do this very well and with a lot more people than I could ever teach in person. That being said, there must be something to this.

Obviously, teaching ALL of the material twice isn’t always realistic, so the first “quick pass” through the information should hit the high points without going as far as to turn it into a summary. The nitty-gritty details should be saved for the slower paced run through the material. This is something that will vary greatly from class to class and based on the material.

NOTE: If this post sounds familiar, it’s because this is a re-post of an entry from my previous blog

Teaching presentation, training