How To Spot a Good Instructor

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Right now, today, it's easier for us to learn something – anything – than ever before.

Just think about it. On-demand video. Screencasts. The entire blogosphere at your fingertips. Wikipedia. Search engines that bring a planet's worth of information to you less than a second.

Oh, and there's still the old-fashioned way: sitting in a classroom with an instructor. This could be a typical school classroom, but it could also be a seminar at a conference, or a workshop like the ones we do here at Purple Workshops.

What's New is Old Again

Actually, all of these new mediums share many similarities to the old-style traditional classroom setting.

When you're in 4th grade trying to learn how to build your first science fair project (usually the dreaded volcano), the person with the knowledge you need is your teacher, and he or she has a variety of options for sharing that knowledge:

Even better, they probably use a combination of all of the above.

Suppose the 4th grade teacher said, “Watch this screencast instead while I run some errands.” Would the knowledge transfer happen just as effectively? Would you really learn the same things? And would it be as fun?

Perhaps it would be. One advantage of a screencast, for example, is that you could take watch the screencast as many times as you want until you feel you understood it. You could watch it from home, instead of trying to hear the teacher in the middle of a loud, bustling 4th grade homeroom.

But with one-way mediums like screencasts and blogs, there are many shortcomings. Perhaps the greatest of these is that you can't ask questions along the way. If you don't understand a key concept at the start of the screencast, you might not get any value from the rest of the screencast at all.

The advantage of most blogs is your chance to leave comments and ask questions of the author, who might respond. But it's still pretty much a one-way shot.

Learning Modalities

A lot of research has been done on how people learn. You may have heard that some people are “visual learners,” while others learn best through an auditory experience. Others learn best through a tactile experience. Kids who are learning to count often don't learn by writing out equations on a blackboard. Or even drawing pictures of apples on a blackboard. They need to physically handle something in order to “get it.” This is why a playing with beads or blocks is important for internalizing the concepts of “zero” and “one” and “two”.

Many adults feel they learn best by reading logical explanations of the concepts they seek to understand. Walk into a Borders or Barnes & Noble – their whole business is based on it.

This works because for at a certain point, we learn to think abstractly. We read the sentence, “Now throw the second beanbag up in the air as you prepare to catch the first,” and transform it into how we learned as child: we might feel that we can “hear” the voice of the words in the book, and we can visualize the action being described.

Meanwhile, others of us prefer to learn from screencasts, since the combination of video and voice (if there's a narration overdubbed onto the video) is much closer to a live, in-person experience.

But there's still no substitute from learning in a real, live, seminar or workshop setting, where a combination of visual, auditory, and tactile modes are all at work simulataneously.

How To Spot a Great Instructor

You've had at least one great teacher that you can remember from your days in school. What made he or she so special?

Indeed, not all instructors are alike. When you are paying money to take a workshop or seminar, or you're trying to decide which breakout sessions to attend at a conference, you want to be sure that you're going to learn what you need to learn before it's over. Here are a few qualities that good instructors possess:

  1. The instructor knows the material. Conference organizers should be sure to include important facts in the instructor's “bio statement” that gives you some guidance here.
  2. The instructor uses more than one modality. Ever wonder why bullet-point Powerpoint presentations suck for learning new material? Well, there's actually lots of reasons, but an instructor who simply reads bullet points has reduced the experience back into an abstract logical exercise, no better than if you were reading the material on your own.
  3. The instructor brings and encourages a sense of humor into the seminar. You don't want a standup comedian, but you need someone who's able to share their joy of the topic to everyone in the room. Learning that isn't fun, isn't effective.
  4. The instructor isn't worried about mistakes. Have you ever learned something by explaining something to someone else? It happens more than you might think. Making mistakes in front of a group is scary, but always very valuable for everyone involved. It lets the attendees see how the instructor fixes something that's broken, which in itself is highly instructive.
  5. The instructor isn't intimidating. The best way to learn is by asking questions. Too many seminars ask people to "hold questions until the end." Or the instructor has a rockstar aura, making people feel awkward if they ask a seemingly "newbie" question. Instructors should always have a non-threatening, everyone-can-participate approach.

Try It Yourself

Some people go to conferences and workshops all the time, but don't really have the results to show for it. If that's you, our advice is to start sharing your knowledge with others. Start a blog. Make a screencast. Pair with a fellow worker on a task. When you have to explain something to someone else, chances are you'll force yourself to know the topic in a deeper way than ever have before.

Others never go to conferences, or never sign up for a workshop. If that's you, you're missing out on an experience that can single-handedly get your career up another notch in a short amount of time.

And of course, if you're looking for somewhere to start, take a look at our upcoming public workshops. We really think you're going to enjoy the Purple experience.