Curt’s View of Workplace Learning

Whether you call it teaching, facilitating, or instructing, I really love this particular workplace learning profession.  As workplace learning professionals, I think we all appreciate having an impact on our learners, the fact that they’ve maybe learned something new, and the impact that they may have as a result.  But being in the classroom, whether in person or virtual, really excites me because I get to SEE it happen.

I was recently reading The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch.

He describes the satisfaction that he gets from different aspects of teaching.  How cool is that!  He talks about the “head fake” in the context of teaching.  That’s when you teach something and the students think they’re learning something else.  What I love about that so much is the planning and forethought that it takes to truly pull something like that off.  I love the deliberateness of it.

Now, I’ll admit that while I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the classroom, and rarely did I go about my business that deliberately.  But there are some basic professional behaviors that I feel are really important.  Here are my top two tips for having a good experience for your students and yourself:

1. Be prepared – If you aren’t prepared, you make a fool of yourself and irritate the learners.  Know your content and for goodness sake, know how your exercises work, and be able to explain them CLEARLY.
2. Use good public speaking/presentation skills – I recently had an instructor that gave me flashbacks of Ben Stein’s rendition of an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  “Bueller, Bueller…”

I could go on and on about this, but there you have it.  What are your top tips for being the best instructor, facilitating, or instructing?

Curt Will

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