Teaching and learning
Looking back on ten years of codebar Brighton, I’m remembering how much I got out of being a coach.
Something that I realised very quickly is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to coaching. Every student is different so every session should adapt to that.
Broadly speaking I saw two kinds of students: those that wanted to get results on screen as soon as possible without worrying about the specifics, and those who wanted to know why something was happening and how it worked. In the first instance, you get to a result as quickly as possible and then try to work backwards to figure out what’s going on. In the second instance, you build up the groundwork of knowledge and then apply it to get results.
Both are equally valid approaches. The only “wrong” approach as a coach is to try to apply one method to someone who’d rather learn the other way.
Personally, I always enjoyed the groundwork-laying of the second approach. But it comes with challenges. Because the results aren’t yet visible, you have to do extra work to convey why the theory matters. As a coach, you need to express infectious enthusiasm.
Think about the best teachers you had in school. I’m betting they displayed infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter.
The other evergreen piece of advice is to show, don’t tell. Or at the very least, intersperse your telling with plenty of showing.
Bret Viktor demonstrates this when he demonstrates scientific communication as sequential art:
This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.
It works remarkably well. I remember how well it worked when Google first launched their Chrome web browser. They released a 40 page comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud. There is no way I would’ve read a document that long about how browser engines work, but I read that comic cover to cover.
This visual introduction to machine learning is another great example of simultaneous showing and telling.
So showing augments telling. But interactivity can augment showing.
Here are some great examples of interactive explainers:
- Cameras and Lenses by Bartosz Ciechanowski,
- An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid by Josh W Comeau,
- CSS :has() Interactive Guide by Ahmad Shadeed,
- Pizza Exchange Rate by Nathan Yau, and
- just about everything by Nicky Case.
Lea describes what can happen when too much theory comes before practice:
Observing my daughter’s second ever piano lesson today made me realize how this principle extends to education and most other kinds of knowledge transfer (writing, presentations, etc.). Her (generally wonderful) teacher spent 40 minutes teaching her notation, longer and shorter notes, practicing drawing clefs, etc. Despite his playful demeanor and her general interest in the subject, she was clearly distracted by the end of it.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a 5 year old’s short attention span, but I could tell what was going on: she did not understand why these were useful, nor how they connect to her end goal, which is to play music.
The codebar website has some excellent advice for coaches, like:
- Do not take over the keyboard! This can be off-putting and scary.
- Encourage the students to type and not copy paste.
- Explain that there are no bad questions.
- Explain to students that it’s OK to make mistakes.
- Assume that anyone you’re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.
Notice how so much of the advice focuses on getting the students to do things, rather than have them passively sit and absorb what the coach has to say.
Lea also gives some great advice:
- Always explain why something is useful. Yes, even when it’s obvious to you.
- Minimize the amount of knowledge you convey before the next opportunity to practice it. For non-interactive forms of knowledge transfer (e.g. a book), this may mean showing an example, whereas for interactive ones it could mean giving the student a small exercise or task.
- Prefer explaining in context rather than explaining upfront.
It’s interesting that Lea highlights the advantage of interactive media like websites over inert media like books. The canonical fictional example of an interactive explainer is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age. Andy Matuschak describes its appeal:
When it wants to introduce a conceptual topic, it begins with concrete hands-on projects: Turing machines, microeconomics, and mitosis are presented through binary-coding iron chains, the cipher’s market, and Nell’s carrot garden. Then the Primer introduces extra explanation just-in-time, as necessary.
That’s not how learning usually works in these domains. Abstract topics often demand that we start with some necessary theoretical background; only then can we deeply engage with examples and applications. With the Primer, though, Nell consistently begins each concept by exploring concrete instances with real meaning to her. Then, once she’s built a personal connection and some intuition, she moves into abstraction, developing a fuller theoretical grasp through the Primer’s embedded books.
(Andy goes on to warn of the dangers of copying the Primer too closely. Its tricks verge on gamification, and its ultimate purpose isn’t purely to educate. There’s a cautionary tale there about the power dynamics in any teacher/student relationship.)
There’s kind of a priority of constituencies when it comes to teaching:
Consider interactivity over showing over telling.
Thinking back on all the talks I’ve given, I start to wonder if I’ve been doing too much telling and showing, but not nearly enough interacting.
Then again, I think that talks aren’t quite the same as hands-on workshops. I think of giving a talk as being more like a documentarian. You need to craft a compelling narrative, and illustrate what you’re saying as much as possible, but it’s not necessarily the right arena for interactivity.
That’s partly a matter of scale. It’s hard to be interactive with every person in a large audience. Marcin managed to do it but that’s very much the exception.
Workshops are a different matter though. When I’m recruiting hosts for UX London workshops I always encourage them to be as hands-on as possible. A workshop should not be an extended talk. There should be more exercises than talking. And wherever possible those exercises should be tactile, ideally not sitting in front of a computer.
My own approach to workshops has changed over the years. I used to prepare a book’s worth of material to have on hand, either as one giant slide deck or multiple decks. But I began to realise that the best workshops are the ones where the attendees guide the flow, not me.
So now I show up to a full-day workshop with no slides. But I’m not unprepared. I’ve got decades of experience (and links) to apply during the course of the day. It’s just that instead of trying to anticipate which bits of knowledge I’m going to need to convey, I apply them in a just-in-time manner as and when they’re needed. It’s kind of scary, but as long as there’s a whiteboard to hand, or some other way to illustrate what I’m telling, it works out great.