Then he gave me some advice about teaching that’s stuck with me for more than three decades: “Just pretend you’re teaching you. How would you do that? What would you want to know? What did you dislike when you were taught? What stories would you tell to make it understandable? What would keep you interested and engaged?”
—
Steve Blank in Teach Like You’re the Student
Steve Blank in Teach Like You’re the Student
John
on 16 Aug 10That advice will work wonders, IF you’re teaching people who are like you.
When I started teaching college, my problem was that I assumed other people thought like I did. It took me a while to realize most people think very differently than I do.
Amber Shah
on 16 Aug 10+1 for John
This applies to both teaching and managing, that we will tend to automatically do them like we’d want them done to us. Except very often that turns out to be not the right way because people learn differently.
My husband and I are both software developers but we have very different styles of learning and working. Whenever I’m confronted with a generalization like this, the test I use is whether it works for both my husband and myself. In this case: not really.
While there are some things that could work on both of us, to really thrive we need different approaches entirely. For example, he must must MUST do something in order to learn, and has the opposite effect if you make him sit and read bland articles, but he is happy to jump in. I am more cautious and am happy to learn lessons in books or observe others before trying things out myself.
Tony
on 16 Aug 10I also agree with John.
Teaching is about understanding your student and their needs to learn, it isn’t about looking inward.
If you read the blog post, what you find is that the writer became comfortable after he spent time with his students, and realized they were “just like him”. Then he could decide to “teach like you’re the student.”
The important thing to take away from the post is not the result of the interaction, but the importance of the interaction itself.
The best teachers, really, are the ones who can explain things in a way that anyone can understand, not just themselves, and also show personal interest in their students.
Allen Pike
on 16 Aug 10When I did my Computing Science degree, I realized that most of the teaching quality problems people complained about were because of this attitude. These people were more highly immersed in the subject than almost anyone in the world, and had PhD-level math education. Still, they were teaching people who wanted to make software as if they were similar.
Scott
on 16 Aug 10This quote fails to mention that Steve Blank gave this advice in the context of his experience, of which he says “my students were exactly like me”.
Tony
on 16 Aug 10...it strikes me that this statement was of interest because it sounds like 37 signals’ “build software for yourself” maxim.
I think it would be an interesting conversation to compare how people learn, versus how people use software. I believe there are lessons there, but that those aren’t domains that completely correlate.
I think 37signals “build software for yourself” concept works because you folks want simple software…and simple works for everybody.
Adam
on 16 Aug 10If you are teaching primary education to people who ought to know what you teach whether they want to or not, this is true.
But if you are an expert teaching people who want to be experts, it is exactly backwards. Experience shows that experts frequently over-emphasize “general concepts” in their instruction despite the fact that they learned through hard-won experience. The tendency to remove memorization or scrappy problem-solving and replace them with abstract thinking marks many of the disciplines currently experiencing identity crises. From literature to computer science.
Get good at something by working hard. Then funnel people after you to do the same hard work.
mac
on 16 Aug 10+ for John
Phil Willis
on 16 Aug 10Wrong.
The first rule of communication is “consider your audience”.
You can’t assume they will be like you.
Communication is what the listener experiences, not what the speaker does.
Having said that – using storytelling as a teaching tool is sound advice.
It’s okay 37 Signals – even though I disagree, I still love you guys.
Nathan
on 16 Aug 10This is terrible advice. And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so. Not only is thinking all your students are like you probably a bad assumption, it’s likely you can’t accurately remember what were the hard of learning something anyway.
Can you remember what was difficult about say, learning algebra? That sort of basic stuff comes so naturally now that its hard to remember what it was like not to know it. You end up having to guess what the students will find difficult, and you’ll probably be wrong.
Dustin J. Mitchell
on 17 Aug 10I’m with John. This is probably some of the worst advice you could give a new teacher. Adam, this is even true for elementary school. The single most important instructional skill for a teacher is to make an accurate assessment of the learner’s (or, in a classroom, learners’) current state, and find the most appropriate next steps to evolve that state in the desired direction.
The skill is the hardest to practice in the area you’re most familiar with. When I teach math, if I think of the students as little me’s, then I’m inclined to write down some definitions, prove a few theorems, and move on. Obviously, that doesn’t work well!
Even for grown-ups, it’s an inappropriate strategy – all the more so because grown-ups’ experiences and understandings have a far greater range than those of kids. Furthermore, kids will usually let you know when they don’t get it, usually by acting out. Most adults will quietly decide you’re useless and quietly start playing solitaire on their blackberry, and pretty soon you’re yakking on and nobody’s listening.
Remind me not to read Steve’s book.
GeeIWonder
on 17 Aug 10It’s not bad advice. It’s just partial advice.
You teach half the class one way, and half in a complimentary way. If you’re assuming they are ‘like you’ it requires a cold examination of your strengths and weaknesses, which is not something most people are readily able to do, but if you are, the advice given is quite sound. And certainly far better than just aiming for the Platonic shadow of ‘most people’ that John and those who echo him seem to be targeting.
mknopf
on 18 Aug 10The facts are that you have to start somewhere when you’re putting together a lesson plan. When I give talks on technology (“how to’s” and such) I write my entire lesson in advance and even post it to my blog.
However, the first thing I do (after telling the audience who I am) is assess the audience’s general skill level by asking a set of questions. Then I decide, based on this assessment, what I should focus on the most. If the group has had a lot of experience with the topic I’m covering than I’ll focus a lot more attention on the details that they may have experience with but need to guidance.
If the audience is all new-comers to the topic than I’ll spend a lot more time on introducing the technology, just touching some of the more advanced topics so that they have had some exposure and know what to look for when they dive deeper.
This is the nature of teaching, to access your audience and then change your lesson to a level where they will be the most successful.
This discussion is closed.