Tips for teachers

While the article is titled “Being a Woman is Not a Disability“, and while the article is presented in the context of powerlifting, what the article is really about is teaching.

Teaching boils down to a lot of the same concepts, whether you’re teaching arithmetic, how to bench press, how to shoot a gun, how to bake a cake. And addressing needs of a student rarely comes down to the student’s gender, race, ethnicity, religious preference, sexual orientation, age, etc.. Oh sure, sometimes those things do matter, but all too often teachers/coaches/educators apply the wrong context and thus the wrong solution. For example, many times when teaching beginning shooters, women do get treated differently. But I’ve found issues with new shooters aren’t because of gender, but because of something like smaller/weaker hands. Yes one can make the generalization that women have smaller and weaker hands than men, but I’ve seen some large strong women and some small weak men. It wasn’t their gender that mattered, it was their hand size and strength. Thus what’s important to address is their hand size and strength, not their gender.

Successful teaching does follow the same guidelines regardless of the topic being taught. Amy Wattles’ article does a fine job of presenting these guidelines:

• The introduction is the most important part of a lesson<
• After the delivery of your instruction, check for understanding.
• Next, it is time to demonstrate the skill to be acquired.
• Provide students with constructive feedback throughout the lesson.

Read her article for full details, including a good list of additional tips for teaching success.

One thing I’ll add? Know your audience.

If you know your audience, you can better shape the presentation of your message. Let’s say you want to teach how to bake a cake. How might your presentation differ if your students were a group of adults vs. a class of kindergarteners vs. veteran chefs? Your material and message would be the same, but how you present that message, how you work to convey your information, that’s going to and should differ from audience to audience. Suppose you didn’t change. Suppose you wrote it all out for a group of veteran chefs and your audience is a group of 5-year-olds? Do you think your presentation is going to succeed? Do you think you’ll successfully convey your message? Unlikely.

Some might say that they don’t know what their audience will be comprised of. If that’s the case, then you still know that fact and should proceed accordingly. But you may also be able to glean at least a little something. For example, when a new class of Basic Pistol 1 students show up at KR Training, we generally don’t know what to expect. We will have people of both gender, wide range of ages, many ethnicities, socio-economic status, background (e.g. maybe they were brought here due to a bad crime victim experience and are very sensitive)… it’s all over the map. We really can’t know much and thus have to be reserved in our presentation. But we can know they are all here to learn how to shoot a gun, and most are coming because of an interest in personal defense, so we can play off that tidbit of audience awareness.

Teaching is rewarding, even more so when you’re successful at it. Knowing how to teach helps you succeed.