Blog: Growth - Teaching

This is a series I am writing about blogging. It’s a reflection of the journey I have taken and highlights along the way.

I will go through the following topics related to my blogging journey in their own articles:

• motivation
• learnings from posts
  • creativity
  • structure thoughts
• external benefits
  • interviewing - preparation
  • interviewing - reference
  • presentations
• personal growth
  • teaching others (this article)
  • failures

As I have taken more senior roles in my career, there is an expectation for me to teach more. Transfer the knowledge I have to those less experienced than me. To get them up to speed quicker, to avoid the same mistakes I made, be effective faster, etc.

A great tool in teaching others my knowledge is: (can you guess?) this blog.

Yes, whenever there is a “teaching moment” with a person I am working with, I would look up the link to a specific blog article and give it to them.

This helps on different ways:

1. The best resource I have on a topic is one that I wrote
2. Initial teaching/learning happens asynchronously by reading first
3. I save energy by not trying to remember on the fly everything on the topic

Best Resource

Well, my articles may not be the absolute best resource, within my contexts, they are the ones I know the best. I have written them for me and I (hopefully) compiled all the necessary information for the topic to be complete in my context.

Asynchronicity

There is an asynchronous benefit for the teacher and learner when there is a written resource by the teacher for the learner to use.

Teaching

For me, teaching happens all the time. The best is when there are good resources and time.

By writing down my own learnings and codifying it as a resource, I prepare for teaching ahead of time. I can also each without being there to describe every step of the process.

Learning

For me, when I am learning when I can spend time reading on a specific topic using the right resource. That makes my learning effective.

When the learner can take their time to digest the material without the teacher, me, rushing them through it (because I know it well) - this space provides better time to comprehend the material for the learner.

Energy-Savings

Questions I get on sometimes I haven’t touched in awhile. Or at least in a manner of: “How did you learn to do X?”

I probably know X well enough now that I can just tell you how to do X. To tell you how I learned X? That’s a different set of skills and/or memories.

I usually forget things once I’ve written them down (that’s why I write them down.)

At the same time, I make it a habit to write down things when I first learn them, to reinforce the learning. In cases of “how did you learn to do X?” scenarios, these articles are great.