For this blog I wanted to share my thoughts, feedback and things that I learnt about my experience during the Learn What The Data School Learns program.
This is something completely out of my comfort zone, as I have never done anything regarding teaching a group of people before. I was both excited and nervous leading up until the moment the program started.
The topic that I chose to teach was transforming data focusing on the transpose and cross tab tools in Alteryx. Here are the 3 things I learnt…
1 – Be Prepared
Going in blind to a lesson is never a good idea and is something that is easily avoidable. Go over the content yourself and re-learn/re-vise the topic area, this will then help with setting time aside to build a lesson plan. A step-by-step plan will help you and is something that you can refer to if you get stuck during the lesson. Once you have done the steps above, practice going through your lesson, practice makes perfect.
2 – Don’t be afraid of silence
More often than not you won’t have much engagement from your audience. Don’t let this stumble you, continue to ask the questions you want to ask and try to get your audience involved. But if still you get nothing, that’s okay. Having your own answers to the questions you ask is a great way to deal with this, as you’re giving the audience a chance to get involved themselves, but then you can also give them the knowledge by answering yourself.
3 – Keep the material short
Time will fly by during a lesson like this, so be sure to keep your content short. Allow time for introductions at the start to get to know your audience and so your audience knows you. Remember, for a lot of the audience this may be their first time learning the area or using the program, so you’ll need to go slow.
Finally, finishing 10-15 minutes early is ideal as this allows time for questions at the end while still staying in the allocated time slot. During this program we had a 90 minute time slot, for which I prepared 45-60 minutes of content, and I finished right on time.
Hopefully going by these 3 pointers will help future Data Schoolers to succeed when they do the Learn What The Data School Learns program.
Thank you!