Tips for Teaching (WIP)
12:09 AM
November 16 2020
learn
- Set clear expectations. Provide a clear summary/syllabus beforehand, make it easy to understand, and encourage them to do research on those topics before lessons. It's easier to learn when you prepared your mindset for it.
- Value failure while learning. Move fast and break things. The fear of failure often slows down the learning process, let them know that bugs and errors are a good way to learn from them.
- Use real-world process. Use github repos for the assignments, pull request, and code reviews for evaluations (and evaluate with pass/no-pass instead of scores)
- Allow them to copy-paste, but encourage learning through it. Teach them how to find answers on stack overflow, github, or by reading blog articles. Allow them to implement them while learning to do so.
- Use best practices. Don't use placeholders for coding examples like foo/bar, and teach them how to look for best practices by themselves.
- Discourage memorization. Usually, students came with the idea of learning everything by memory. Teach them that what they need to learn is how to solve problems, not the actual implementation. Let them know that in real jobs they will be able to use all type of resources, so they don't feel the need to memorize entire APIs.
- Show them how to learn something that you don't know. Be the example of how to research something that you don't know yet and how to use it in a real scenario.
Write the lessons in text, you can use them later as blog articles or as text complement to other resources.\
From the text version, you can later transform that into visual resentations, videos, or podcasts.