HN Explorer

Ask HN: Resources for becoming a better teacher?

15 points by quicksnap ↗ HN
I am considering a teaching position for a code school, after already teaching once before. Students are generally pretty smart, and there is already a substantial amount of learning resources online for the material at hand. However, I still feel like I'm winging it with my teaching skills.

Are there some recommend resources for educating adults, particularly the kind you'd find attending a code school? I'd like to learn some core concepts of education that would improve my approaches.

5 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 93.9 ms ] thread
posix_compliant
Organize a meetup! I gave a 45 minute talk in SF last week, and I felt it provided a good environment for creating and honing teaching skills.

It was the hard deadline that got me to actually create a message, a slide deck, and hammer down a presentation. Without such deadlines, it never felt "real" to me, so I had a hard time improving.

The meetup doesn't have to be on an advanced topic, either. There are plenty of intro-to-programming meetups which would be happy to have a guest speaker. Granted, the audience can vary wildly since it's public, but all in all I recommend it.

quicksnap
I agree completely. I have given a few talks, and it's always a great exercise. Still, I want to find some info behind the "engineering of teaching" I guess =)
hckmd
Software Carpentry's Instructor Training materials might be worth looking into. All of the materials are available here and are licensed under creative commons: https://swcarpentry.github.io/instructor-training/

The materials are aimed at people who know programming already and that would be teaching software skills to scientists with limited experience programming. From what I've read so far it offers a good overview of the important areas (e.g. cognitive load, novice vs experts).