What I Learned from Teaching My First Course

What I Learned from Teaching My First Course

I had the opportunity to teach a course on data analysis using Excel and Power BI with two colleagues from my course (Production Engineering at UFRN), Erick Lima and Pablo Santos. Before teaching the course, I asked the ladies at PyLadies Natal for some tips, and Gabi Cavalcante wrote a summary of some tips they gave me.

This teaching journey brought me several challenges and new learning practices, as I still have much to learn to share what I know.

Here are some points that were relevant to my experience:

1. How to Design a Course?

“The answers are in the books, on the internet. The teacher's mission is to provoke intelligence, provoke amazement, provoke curiosity” — Rubem Alves

Being on the other side of the course made me reflect on how I would like to learn, but it’s worth remembering that the teaching and learning experience is extremely diverse. So how to balance my expectations with those of the participants? Some points were taken into focus for development:

Planning

• What cases will be presented?
• How will they be solved?
• What results should be achieved?

Schedule

• How much time will it take to pass on this knowledge?
• How much time to assist participants?

Validation

• How will I measure participant satisfaction?
• What score would you give the course from 0 to 10?
• What is your opinion about the course?
• What can we improve?

2. “Does Anyone Have Any Questions?”

“Could you repeat the part where you said all about the things?”

Someone will always have a question and not speak up.

Keeping dozens of people focused for consecutive hours on a Saturday from 8 AM to 6 PM is not an easy task. Throughout the course, we were very concerned with making ourselves understood, after all, it was our responsibility to pass on the knowledge. And even when we stopped and asked, “Does anyone have any questions?” few people raised their hands.

The advantage of being in a larger group was that while one was teaching, the other two would go around checking if everyone was on the same page. This helped A LOT in monitoring the participants, although it is an unfeasible practice for a course with a single instructor.

What could have been done?

• In the middle of the course, we tried using Zoom to share our screen and facilitate participant viewing, but since we would have to wait for everyone to download it, it would take time. The lesson learned — we should have done this right from the start.
• Another thing we should have thought of beforehand was to pair everyone up. Even using ZoomIt, it was sometimes difficult to follow. We noticed that participants who were further back in the room or alone had more difficulty keeping up with the pace because it was a lot of content, and without someone nearby, they had no immediate support.

3. Everyone Suffers from the Nervous Finger Syndrome

“Emergency? I just tried to make toast, and a hand came out of the toaster and stabbed me in the face!” “Did you read the first page of the manual?” “Well, no, but all I wanted was…”

Everyone who uses electronic devices suffers from the pseudo “Nervous Finger Syndrome.” They start clicking on everything they see on the computer or smartphone screen, and I’m not the one saying this; it’s a topic of a University of Texas article. Keeping this in mind, we only made the course materials available as they were needed. To facilitate this, we created bit.ly links for the materials to be downloaded and shared them when necessary. This avoided the time-consuming and data integrity issues of passing around pen drives.

Let’s Keep Growing! 🤘🏻

Teaching the first course was a significant step to break the ice and learn to keep learning more and more.