Guide, Don’t Control
Teaching is simply about letting people tinker with learning materials they’ve found themselves and helping them back onto the right path when they’ve gone astray.
That’s the essence of it. Let me break it down a bit further.
As a teacher, you can explain things and demonstrate how you, the expert, approach a task. Showing the steps needed to create something is valuable—this is how knowledge has been passed down for generations. But simply showing someone how to do something isn’t enough. Real learning happens when people try stuff out themselves, encountering unexpected challenges along the way. In other words, they need to tinker. They must experiment, figure out their own methods, and make the process their own.
Sure, you can teach people the fundamentals and demonstrate how things work in a perfect scenario. But the real world isn’t a constant. For example, when teaching coding, your students may be using a different version of a framework than the one you used in teaching. Maybe it’s a new version where things work a bit differently, or perhaps it’s an older one that throws errors you haven’t addressed. This is where learners need to seek out their own materials and resources to fix issues like these.
On top of that, people are probably more motivated to learn when they’ve found the resources themselves, rather than relying on what you provide. Your role as a teacher isn’t to prescribe how they should learn—it’s to help them get unstuck when they hit a roadblock. It’s about guiding them back to the right track when they steered themselves too far off course, down a path you know won’t lead anywhere.
Show people what they need to learn, give them control over how they learn it, and keep them moving in the right direction. That's all here is to it.