4 Insights on How to Teach Others Successfully
When people think of teachers, the first thing that comes to mind is usually a classroom with someone at the front lecturing. This is a natural response, but teaching occurs everywhere and at all times. Throughout your life and career, you’ll encounter moments where you have to teach people. Whether it’s because someone new joined your team and needs the rundown, a junior member needs insight on technical processes, or a team member hits a roadblock, moments for teaching occur all the time.
You might have encountered a situation where someone is leaving their company and in a mad dash to get all their knowledge spread to the rest of the team, they hold a super long meeting to ‘teach’ others how to do the stuff they do. But in reality, that teaching is just them spewing out words and no one is actually absorbing the information. This is because they aren’t properly conveying the information they want others to know. You can be the smartest person in the room, but it means nothing if you don’t know how to tell people the information you know. Throughout my years as a college student and then transitioning into my career, I have noticed certain things that aid in teaching people. Here are four things I believe help when teaching others.
- Patience
If there is one thing all teachers and mentors need, it’s patience. Every single person learns at a different rate and absorbs information differently. Your job isn’t to cram information down people’s throats but to work with people, so they fully understand the subject and can do things on their own. This takes time, communication, and patience to achieve because there will be times where you explain something in a certain way, and they don’t understand it. This isn’t because they are dumb, but because the information was presented in the wrong way. You need to find out how to portray the information in an easier format for that individual.
2. Take things slow
This leads to the second point which is to take things slow. Rushing through and telling them everything quickly is not going to help anyone because they won’t know anything by the end of the explanation. Take things one part at a time and make sure that they understand everything thus far before moving on to the next part. Since advanced topics build upon the fundamentals, they won't learn anything further if they don’t have a good foundation. This could mean having multiple teaching sessions for a topic as to not bombard them with too much information at once, or just take breaks and see if they understand the current topic before moving on. Give them time to ask questions during those breaks and throughout the mentoring session. If you wait to take questions at the end, they will either not remember the question, or the rest of the content confused them more, leading them to have a million more questions because their original one was never answered.
3. Become your student
This plays into taking it slow and breaking up the content into reasonable chunks. A good way to make sure you divide the content into reasonable pieces is to put yourself in the shoes of your mentee. Think about what they know and what they don’t know. A common mistake when teaching someone is you start to assume they know more than they do. This creates a disconnect, making it harder for the student to learn the content. So first take a step back and assume they don’t know all that much. What you can also do is just ask them straight out while teaching ‘Hey, do you know about <insert topic here>?’. People think this can be offensive if the topic is simple, but you can’t read minds. You need to communicate to get a feel for what they know going into the mentoring session.
4. Remember your tone
Lastly, one of the biggest factors when teaching someone is your tone and level of excitement. You should never go into a teaching session upset or angry. People are very empathetic, and your mood will change their mood. No one can learn while angry or sad, and so you need to show excitement about the topic you are teaching. It changes the perception of the subject matter, turning it from something they might hate into something they enjoy. The content doesn’t change, but your attitude towards it can make the difference between a student paying attention and understanding the material and not understanding anything because they can’t focus.
These 4 principles are not the only aspects that matter when mentoring someone but are some of the most important that I’ve experienced when teaching others. I hope this gave you some insight into the best practices of teaching others and helped you rethink your approach. The most important thing moving forward is that we keep spreading knowledge!
