What I’ve Learned from Teaching Programming

I am not a teacher, professor, trainer, etc. but I recently was afforded the opportunity to teach programming to my co-workers.

At work we started doing more and more development in .NET. I previously acquired skills in .NET from a previous employer. My co-workers had minimal exposure to .NET and object-oriented programming.

My boss approached me to ask if I’d liked to teach ASP.NET to the rest of my co-workers. Naturally, I accepted because I thought teaching would help reinforce my skills.

The Setup

Lesson Planning

I got started learning .NET from studying for my MCTS, so I decided to prepare 10 one-hour lessons based on topics from the Microsoft Press books:

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-562): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 ASP.NET Application Development

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation

Since many of my co-workers had not been exposed to object-oriented programming, I made the first lesson an overview. I knew that this would be vital to understanding the .NET framework. For this I just used Wikipedia as a resource.

The conclusion of each lesson was a “homework” problem using the techniques explained in the lesson.

Teaching Environment

Many of my co-workers work remotely, so teaching via the web was the best means. To facilitate this, I used the services of Dimdim for web conferencing in combination with a teleconference bridge.

Successful or Not?

I ended up delivering teaching all of my lessons. There were times where I had technical difficulties where the web conference experience lag time or my lesson samples wouldn’t produce the expected results. Through preparing each week’s lessons I reinforced my .NET knowledge and studied beyond what I was teaching to make sure I could explain any questions that may have been asked.

So my delivery was (mostly) successful and I learned a lot, but are these the criteria in which to measure success?

Feedback

What was missing from my teaching methods was the feedback of my co-workers. I never took it upon myself to ask them if they were learning. When you are teaching in a corporate environment it is difficult to gauge the progress of your “students”.

It would’ve helped me if I knew my lessons were heading in the right direction. I’ve asked my co-workers at the end of all the lessons what they got from my teaching, but by that time it was too late.

A couple of the responses I received were:

It’s difficult to learn a new programming language unless I’m using it for a project.

I tend to get distracted when learning via webinar.

Things I Would Do Differently

I think a classroom setting would be the ideal environment for teaching/learning. This may be costly especially if you have remote employees. Given this experience with teaching via webinar, I sometimes wonder about the quality of some online degree programs.

I also could have given an exam to ensure my co-workers were paying attention and/or grasping what I was teaching, but I think asking a more effective way would be to get them involved by asking specific questions or having them work hands-on in a classroom.

By becoming a teacher (if only through work), I know understand the importance of feedback/evaluation. In academia, most teachers and professors will require an evaluation at the conclusion of a class, but I think continual evaluation would be most beneficial for the student and the teacher.

The teacher can adjust his/her teaching style to adapt to the students and the students will be able to comprehend what they are learning.