A Crash Course on Teaching

These best practices helped you learn at school, now they will help you teach others at work

22 min readJul 17, 2020

As many parents have learned thanks to the global Covid-19 pandemic, teaching is tough. In most cases, just to qualify as a teacher in North America, you are required to complete at least a bachelor’s degree, but often more specialized certifications are also required. One thing is certain, teachers are highly trained professionals who partake in rigorous professional development opportunities year after year, and most of the rest of us have no idea how they actually manage to get students from point A to B.

“Education is not the filling of a pot but the lighting of a fire.”
–W.B. Yeats

Great teachers positively impact students on a daily basis. They are experts at using a variety of tools and techniques to impart new knowledge and skills to a group of learners. These best practices have many useful applications outside the K-12 classroom, but unfortunately most professionals (and parents) aren’t aware of even half of what great teachers do.

I realized I had a lot to learn from teachers when I started going into their classrooms as part of my job. My task, to introduce students to an online educational game platform, was always the same, yet the classroom environment was always unique. Some classrooms were unruly to say the least, some were incredibly creative, others were shockingly caring and considerate.

In some classes, students would quietly talk to their peers when they were stuck on a problem. In others, students would yell their questions out all at once without raising their hands, or rush out of their seats to line up for help as if their lives depended on it. Some had students who struggled to solve one problem for far too long before I realized they were stuck, while students in others gave up before they even started and surfed the internet instead.

I couldn’t believe the range of classroom cultures — I literally had a different experience each time I visited a new class, without changing one thing about what I did. Sometimes I went home feeling so fulfilled. Sometimes I went home completely exhausted and frustrated. Why was my experience was varying so wildly?

I knew it wasn’t because there were a few “bad” or “good” students. It definitely wasn’t about the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood, the age of the students, or even their learning abilities. As far as I could tell, it had nothing to do with the years of experience the teacher had, the quality of the technology available, the speed of the internet, or the subject being taught. So what was it?

I started studying what the best teachers were doing (and trust me, after visiting hundreds of classrooms, you can spot a great teacher instantly) — mostly because I didn’t want to have to yell to get students’ attention, but also because I was fascinated by these differences. I saw how the best teachers broke down their lessons into mini-lessons (a technique I later learned was called scaffolding); I observed how they strategically assigned students to groups with tasks of varying difficulty (differentiation); I noticed how they all had a few things in common: passion, patience, and positivity. They believed in their students’ potential, and it was clear their students felt respected and valued as a result.

As I paid more attention to how these teachers managed their classrooms, I started to see parallels with own my job as a manager, and I realized that I was the equivalent of a not-so-great teacher to my team.

I often found myself in the position of needing to “teach.” Whether that was onboarding new team members, helping the team understand how to use a new tool, or giving feedback to try to improve someone’s performance. But despite reading countless leadership books and having two business degrees, I had no idea how to actually teach. I defaulted to the simplest form of instruction: telling people what I thought they needed to know, and encouraging them to figure the rest out on their own like I did.

I had a lot of faith in my team’s ability to learn, which was at least a start, but I didn’t to anything to inspire their learning, to differentiate my instruction, or to make my expectations clear: all things great teachers do well.

Over the last six years, I’ve interviewed and studied dozens of teachers to better understand what they learned in school, on the job, from their peers, and through countless professional development opportunities. I wanted to know what set the best apart, if it could be taught, and if their best practices had any relevance outside the classroom.

In short — there are a number of things that set the best teachers apart (which I’m summarizing here), and YES(!) these best practices can be learned by anyone and applied to adults in a workplace. (I’ve outlined the seven lessons I learned as a manager here.)

Every great teacher I have interviewed or observed emphasized that focusing on these four areas were critical to their success:

Setting the Stage for Learning (creating a safe and supportive environment, prioritizing social and emotional learning, and nurturing a growth mindset)
Understanding Learner Needs (studying the curriculum, assessing learning styles, leveraging learning cycles/stages, scaffolding everything possible, and differentiating lessons)
Designing & Delivering Interesting Lessons (bridging the curriculum/learner gap, following the five standards of effective pedagogy, choosing activities to reinforce learning objectives, encouraging participating)
Putting it All Together (creating accountability, providing feedback, and measuring learning)

“Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
–John Steinbeck

1. Setting the Stage For Learning

Creating a Safe & Supportive Environment

The best teachers know which pedagogical tools and strategies engage students. For instance, they use exit tickets as one way to check if students are actually learning. They use cold-calling to improve student participation. But first and foremost, they cultivate a safe and supportive classroom community.

K–12 teachers spend their first couple weeks of every school year building “classroom community” — playing games, doing exercises etc. They understand that productivity comes after students feel safe around each other. A safe and supportive environment engages students. It makes them curious, enthusiastic, and willing to participate. Students will contribute meaningfully in discussions, which enhances the overall classroom learning. One sign that ya teacher has successfully established a safe and supportive environment is when usually quiet students speak up unprompted.

Like students, adults yearn for connection. At Google, researchers reached the same conclusion when investigating why certain teams in their organization do better than others. The best teams had high “average social sensitivity,” the ability to intuit how others feel based on the tone of their voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues. When members feel psychologically safe to bring up new ideas, everyone contributes, and the team’s collective intelligence improves.

Prioritizing Social & Emotional Learning

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

A systemic approach to SEL intentionally cultivates a caring, participatory, and equitable learning environment and evidence-based practices that actively involve all students in their social, emotional, and academic growth. This approach infuses social and emotional learning into every part of students’ daily lives — across all of their classrooms, during all times of the school day, and when they are in their homes and communities.

The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence advocates using “RULER” (an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, Regulating) as a guide to incorporating SEL principles into all aspects of education.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), more than two decades of research shows that SEL leads to:

Increased Academic Achievement: According to a 2011 meta-analysis of 213 studies involving more than 270,000 students, those who participated in evidence-based SEL programs showed an 11% point gain in academic achievement.
Improved Behavior: Studies show decreased dropout rates, school and classroom behavior issues, drug use, teen pregnancy, mental health problems, and criminal behavior.
Strong Return on Investment: A review of six SEL interventions in evidence-based SEL programs showed that for every dollar invested there was an economic return of 11 dollars.

Some examples of how SEL is incorporated into a classroom environment include:

modeling and coaching to recognize how they feel or how someone else might be feeling
class meetings students can practice group decision-making and setting classroom rules
team sports and games to learn cooperation and teamwork through participation
cross-age mentoring, in which a younger student is paired with an older one
helping students consider where their feeling falls on the Mood Meter in terms of how pleasant or unpleasant they feel

Nurturing a Growth Mindset

Teachers are trained to emphasize what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset”, the idea that abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching, and persistence. They believe that mistakes, challenges, or setbacks are a natural part of learning. Fixed mindset people hide their mistakes or conceal their deficiencies by getting defensive, discouraged, giving up, or quitting altogether. According to Dr. Dweck, students who complain of being bored are often just afraid to try.

Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset — Image: Be One

There are a number of ways teachers can help foster a growth mindset in students. For example, they can change the way they give feedback, to focus more on praising effort and highlighting incremental improvements than on evaluating final outcomes. They can also directly teach students about mindsets. Or they can create assignments like Dr. Dweck’s, where she has “the students do research on their hero and find out whether the hero was so famous or successful because they were naturally talented or whether they in fact had to overcome a lot of adversity and work really hard. Not once has it ever been the case that their hero coasted.”

“The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.”
–Joseph Campbell

2. Understanding Learner Needs

Studying the Curriculum

To get students, parents, and teachers all on the same page and working together to ensure that students make progress each year and graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college, career, and life, we need a curriculum.

A curriculum, for example the Common Core, is a framework that sets out the skills and knowledge students need to acquire for long-term success, and the learning objectives which must be met. Broadly speaking, a curriculum is collection of learning goals that teachers translate into lessons, assessments, and other academic content to deliver to their classroom over the course of the year.

A very small sample from the 164 page Ontario Science & Technology Grade 1–8 Curriculum

Just like teachers must prioritize social and emotional learning in their classroom if they are to have any chance of success, they must have a strong grasp on the curriculum they are following.

Assessing Learning Styles

Learning styles refer to a range of competing (and contested) theories that aim to account for differences in individuals’ learning. Proponents recommend that teachers assess the learning styles of their students and adapt their classroom methods to best fit each student’s learning style; however, a number of researchers criticize this approach, saying there is no consistent evidence that an individual student’s learning style, and teaching for specific learning styles produces better student outcomes. Nevertheless, it helps to understand the different theories as there is ample evidence that individuals do express preferences for how they receive information, and the concept of learning styles encourages teachers to use a variety of pedagogical approaches (described in the next section) that make instruction more engaging and effective.

One popular theory for example, the VARK model, identifies four primary types of learners:

visual — preference for seeing (visual aids that represent ideas using methods other than words, such as graphs, charts, diagrams, symbols, etc.)
auditory — preference for listening (lectures, discussions, podcasts, repeating aloud, debates etc.)
reading/writing — preference for text-based learning materials (textbooks, note taking, creating presentations, lists, handouts etc.)
kinesthetic — preference for learning via experience, moving, touching, and doing (active exploration of the world, science projects, field trips, experiments, etc.).

The VARK model posits that not everyone has one defined preferred modality of learning; some people may have a mixture that makes up their preferred learning style.

Other popular theories include Kolb’s Learning Styles, Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, the Grasha-Reichmann Learning Style Scale, the Mind Styles Model, and many more. In my opinion, it’s more important to focus on the fact that there are many ways of learning, and to make sure we use a variety of approaches to teach, rather than focus on the specifics of the dozens of models and theories.

A number of educational researchers agree that although learning styles will inevitably differ among students in the classroom, teachers should try to make changes in their classroom (room redesign, small-group techniques, varied assignments etc.), that will be beneficial to every learning style.

By using a variety of teaching methods from each category, no matter which model a teacher follows, they can cater to different learning styles at once, and improve their instruction by challenging students to learn in different ways.

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
–Robert Frost

Leveraging Stages of Learning

In addition to varying the instructional methods in any given lesson, effective teachers leverage the cycles or stages of learning to structure their lessons so that the lesson objective is reinforced in a number of ways, and students can develop their knowledge and skills in an orderly manner.

They may follow Kolb’s Experiential Learning model, in which the student follows a learning cycle made by four stages. According to Kolb, the ideal learning process engages all four of these modes in response to situational demands; they form a learning cycle from experience to observation to conceptualization to experimentation and back to experience.

Kolb’s Cycle of Learning — Image Source: Giulia Forsythe, www.flickr.com

They may also follow Bloom’s Taxonomy. The goal of an educator using Bloom’s taxonomy is to encourage higher-order thought in their students by building up from lower-level cognitive skills.

Scaffolding Everything Possible

Scaffolding is a way to provide support for students by breaking learning down into manageable chunks as they progress toward stronger understanding and ultimately greater independence. As with Bloom’s Taxonomy, it is a process that moves students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process.

The term itself offers the relevant descriptive metaphor: teachers provide successive levels of temporary support that help students reach higher levels of comprehension and skill acquisition that they would not be able to achieve without assistance. Like physical scaffolding, the supportive strategies are incrementally removed when they are no longer needed, and the teacher gradually shifts more responsibility over the learning process to the student. The theory is that when students are given the support they need while learning something new, they stand a better chance of using that knowledge independently.

“A good teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.”
–Thomas Carruthers

A teacher could for example break a topic into mini lessons, model/demonstrate the main concept within a mini lesson, check for understanding mid-way through and provide more guidance, then give students time to practice while walking around the room to answer any questions. Again, the most important takeaway is that teachers have to vary their approach to best most effective.

Differentiating & Personalizing Lessons

Students vary in culture, socioeconomic status, language skills, motivation, ability/disability, learning styles, personal interests and more. Teachers must be aware of these differences to effectively plan lessons that will engage all students.

Using differentiated instruction, teachers are able to address the learning styles and deficits of their students. Differentiation allows teachers to both engage students who are have more advanced knowledge/skills to uncover deeper layers of learning, and to support less advanced students or students with learning disabilities. Differentiated classrooms include and allow all students to be successful.

As teachers begin to differentiate instruction, there are three main instructional elements that they can adjust to meet the needs of their learners:

Content — the knowledge and skills students need to master.
Process — the activities students use to master the content.
Product — the method students use to demonstrate learning.

Teachers who practice differentiation in the classroom may:

Design lessons based on students’ learning styles.
Group students by shared interest, topic, or ability for assignments.
Set different expectations for task completion for students based upon their individual needs.
Create tiered assignments or a menu of activities for students to choose from.

For example, students who are unfamiliar with the concepts may be required to complete tasks on the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, and application. Students with partial mastery may be asked to complete tasks in the application, analysis, and evaluation areas, and students who have high levels of mastery may be asked to complete tasks in evaluation and synthesis.

Personalizing learning through differentiation not only ensures that students meet curriculum objectives, but also that they are appropriately challenged and engaged with relevant material and activities.

Scaffolding vs. Differentiation

Scaffolding a lesson and differentiating instruction are two different things. Scaffolding is breaking up a lesson into parts and providing a differing level of assistance with each section. When scaffolding reading, for example, you might discuss key vocabulary and historical context before assigning the full reading. With differentiation, you might give a child an entirely different piece of text to read, or modify the assignment that follows.

Simply put, scaffolding is the order of how you deliver a lesson. Once you start the scaffold, you may need to differentiate for those students who are still struggling, by modifying an assignment or making accommodations like assigning an alternative project.

Taken together, the concepts of learning cycles, stages, scaffolding, and differentiation serve as the backbone of assessments, lessons, assignments, and curriculum maps. They can be used as a tool to help balance the way teachers teach and students learn to ensure content is well understood and new skills are developed as a result.

3. Designing & Delivering Interesting Lessons

Bridge the Curriculum-Learning Gap

Teachers use a three-step planning process to bridge the gap between their curriculum and the hearts and minds of their students.

Create an objective for every lesson using simple and clear language
Find something noteworthy about the topic to be covered that can be “sold” to students (they look for what is cool, interesting, fascinating, weird, funny, sad, amazing etc. There is always something interesting.) This step ensures each lesson is exciting to both the teacher and the student .It’s a good idea not to reveal too much about the one thing of note. The best teachers want to leave a bit of mystery. For example, “I’m going to show you something today you’re not going to believe!”
Add connections from teaching materials, life experiences, and expert knowledge to fulfill the noteworthy part of the lesson. Ideally, great teachers put students into a situation they can relate to, engaging them at a personal level. “Class, I have three chocolate bars. But let’s say there are four of you, and you want to share these three bars equally. How would you do that?” [Pause.] “Let’s figure it out. Why don’t you all get into groups of four and try it out?” Notice how the teacher hasn’t even brought up the concept of fractions, numerators and denominators, and hasn’t instructed the students to shade in rectangles on worksheets.

Start with the experience; then relate it to the content. This is teaching. It’s the difference between students clamoring to learn, and staring off into the distance. It’s the context, meaning, relevance, and excitement that makes what teachers have to teach matter to their students.

“When you teach a child something, you take away forever his chance to discover it himself.”
-Jean Piaget

Following the Five Standards of Effective Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy is often described as the act teaching — imparting knowledge and skills in an educational context.

The pedagogy adopted by teachers shapes their teaching strategy by taking into consideration theories of learning, understandings of students and their needs, and the backgrounds and interests of individual students. Conventional western pedagogies view the teacher as knowledge holder and student as the recipient of knowledge (described by Paulo Freire as “banking methods”), but modern theories of pedagogy increasingly identify the student as an agent and the teacher as a facilitator.

The Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence at the University of California identifies five standards for effective pedagogy:

Teacher and students produce together: Learning occurs most effectively when experts and novices work together for a common product or goal, and are therefore motivated to assist one another. For example, teachers could design instructional activities requiring student collaboration to accomplish a joint product, or even participate with students in joint productive activity.
Developing language across the curriculum: Literacy is the most fundamental competency necessary for school success; therefore, developing competence in the language(s) of instruction should be a meta-goal of all educational activity throughout the school day. For example, language development should be fostered through use and through purposeful, deliberate conversation between teacher and students.
Connecting school to students’ lives: as alluded to in the 3-step process to bridge the curriculum/learning gap, learning objectives are best achieved in everyday, culturally meaningful contexts. This contextualization utilizes students’ existing base of knowledge and skills as a foundation for new knowledge. This approach also fosters pride and confidence as well as greater school achievement. For example, a teacher could assist students to connect and apply their learning to their community, or plan jointly with students to design community-based learning activities.
Teaching through conversation: Thinking, and the abilities to form, express, and exchange ideas are best taught through dialogue, through questioning and sharing ideas and knowledge. Teacher should listen carefully, make guesses about intended meaning, and adjust responses to assist students’ efforts. It inherently allows teachers to differentiate and personalize their instruction. This way of teaching is reinforces the three principles above: it is best practiced during joint productive activity; is an ideal setting for language development; and allows sensitive contextualization, and precise, stimulating cognitive challenge (below).
Teaching complex thinking: Education researchers agree that students at risk of educational failure require instruction that is cognitively challenging; that is, instruction that requires thinking and analysis, not only rote, repetitive, detail-level drills (Think: Bloom’s Taxonomy) According to Tolerance.org

“Students at risk of educational failure, particularly those of limited standard English proficiency, are often forgiven any academic challenges on the assumption that they are of limited ability. While such policies may often be the result of benign motives, the effect is to deny many diverse students the basic requirements of progress — high academic standards, meaningful feedback and responsive assistance.”
-Tolerance.org

Leveraging Activities to Reinforce Lesson Objectives

The focus of the three steps above and the standards of effective pedagogy is on how teachers present to their class. The next step is for teachers to determine which activities and methods to use to personalize, differentiate, and allow students to master a topic. One rule of thumb is to spend double the amount of time on activities as on lecturing, leaving aside some time at the end to share, reflect, assess, and reinforce the lesson objective.

As we’ve already alluded to in reviewing a number of the learning theories and models above, there are dozens of techniques to help students absorb knowledge. For example, the VARK model would suggest going on field trips to help kinesthetic learners, and Kolb’s Learning Cycle would suggest discussion groups to help with the Reflective Observation stage of learning. Following Bloom’s Taxonomy alone, there are dozens of suggested activities teachers could use to bring content to life, for example from having students journal to “understand” a lesson, to “creating” a podcast at the more advanced level.

With so many techniques to choose from, I’ve created a short-list of my favourite ones that work just as well with adult learners as with children.

Encouraging Participation

Have you ever asked a question to a group, only to get zero responses? Teachers use the “wait time” method, in which they prompt the class that they can “take ten seconds to come up with an answer,” to increase participation. Waiting ten seconds or longer may seem even agonizing, but calling the first participant excludes students who process more slowly. It also gives the illusion that the class “gets it” when chances are they don’t.

Beyond giving students more time to participate, the best teachers know that students hesitate to participate for five main reasons:

They don’t feel comfortable talking/sharing → Teachers should create a safe and supportive learning environment, using the best practices above
They don’t care → Teachers should make the lessons interesting and engaging using the best practices above
They don’t know the answer → Teachers should vary questions along Bloom’s Taxonomy and contextualize questions. Encourage students to discuss in partners, or give them more time to think of their answers.
The question is confusing → Teachers can find simpler ways to phrase a question, or break the question into smaller chunks “OK, let’s think about the first step only. What would you do first?”
They feel they aren’t expected to participate → Teachers can post the discussion questions visibly, arrange seats in a circle or semi-circle, cold-call on students

‘The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.’
― William Arthur Ward

4. Putting it All Together

Create Accountability

Beyond encouraging students to participate, teachers often struggle to get students to complete their assignments. It’s important to remember students aren’t necessarily lazy. In fact, they are actually quite rational when it comes to prioritizing their workload. Primarily, they want to think if this is going to be worth their time.

Students won’t do the extra work if the material is going to be too difficult or too easy. Teachers can take advantage of how students get satisfaction from mastery and accomplishment by scaffolding and adding elements of gamification to assignments.

Students won’t do the extra work if they don’t think it’s important or if it will be boring. Teachers can “preview” the assignment and highlight why it’s important, interesting, and/or relevant.

Students won’t do the extra work if it’s not going to matter, or if teachers will just end up going over the material next class. Teachers can provide the discussion questions ahead of time, so students know what to look for ahead of time. They can let students know how the material will be discussed in class or graded, so students know they will be held accountable.

Providing Feedback

Learners need steady and consistent feedback to know they are moving forward; however, teachers need to be explicit about their expectations before providing any feedback. When students understand what is expected of them, they will put in the time and effort to meet those expectations.

To help guide feedback, teachers can use a handful of tools to clarify proactively expectations such as:

Exemplars — samples of work that students can refer to (such as a well written paper, or a clear solution to a problem). Exemplars are not templates, which are about plugging responses into the blanks. Rather, they are concrete examples to help students understand what is expected of them. Teachers could also show students what they do not want. Showing both high- and low-quality work, or reviewing common misunderstandings provides students with structure and helps them manage expectations.

Rubrics — documents that articulate the expectations for an assignment and typically range from 1 (poor) to 5(excellent). Like exemplars, they give students a clear idea of what their work should be like. Unlike exemplars, however, rubrics provide conceptual guidelines rather than a concrete example. These tools also help guide teachers when they need to provide feedback.

Once clear expectations have been set, the same feedback best practices apply to the classroom environment as any other environment. It should be specific, timely, thoughtful, caring, and growth oriented.

Finally, students should have the opportunity to provide regular feedback to their teacher so that the learning process, materials, and instruction can be adjusted accordingly. This could be in the form of anonymous feedback surveys or Exit Tickets:

Exit Tickets — A writing prompt given at the end of class to help teachers see what students had trouble with. Think: for students to be allowed to ‘exit’ the classroom, they need to hand the teacher a ‘ticket’ with their answer written on it. Teachers ask questions like: What is the main thing you learned today?What questions do you still have about today’s class? Students’ responses give teachers insight into what parts of a lesson need to be adjusted or revisited in the next class.

Measuring Learning

Beyond the need to provide timely, relevant, and frequent feedback, teachers also need to assess frequently and routinely where students are in relation to the learning objectives.

Formative assessments - help teachers periodically check for understanding throughout a lesson or unit, rather than waiting until the exam or final project (i.e., the summative assessment). They focus on learning goals and take stock of where students in relation to the learning objective. They answer the question: Are students actually learning? The answer then guides future instruction. The information could be gathered informally using tools like Exit Tickets, through graded homework assignments, or with activities like Traffic Lights:

Traffic Lights — Using either electronic surveys or color-coded index cards, teachers can take a quick pulse-check of where individuals are with their understanding of the concepts that have been covered. Students can raise a green card (concept is understood), a yellow card (concept may need some clarification), or a red card (concept requires better explanation). Simply scanning the room for these colors can indicate where the class stands.

Summative Assessments —evaluate student learning and outcomes at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. They create accountability by being ‘high stakes’, for example a midterm exam or a final project. Experts recommend that teachers spend the same amount of time on formative evaluation as they do on summative assessment.

Where Do You Come In?

“Everyone, in some respect, is a teacher; some just work harder to do it better.”
–Terry Heick

We now know that great teachers:

Create an environment conducive to learning by making their classroom safe and supportive, prioritizing SEL, and fostering a growth mindset in their students.
Have a solid understanding of the curriculum they need to follow, educational theories and models, and leverage research-backed best practices to meet students where they are by scaffolding and differentiating what they teach.
Intentionally create engaging lessons that are contextualized and challenging for every student. They use a variety of activities to bring any topic to life, and they actively encourage participation.
Reinforce learning by creating accountability, regularly providing helpful feedback, and using a range of tools to measure learning.

Like any great teacher would have their students do, I want you to start applying what you’ve learned. You can start by reflecting on these questions:

How can you help create the right environment for learning in your workplace?
The next time you need to teach something, how can you make your lesson more interesting, personalized, and focused on one single learning objective?
What activities could you incorporate into your routines at work to make a task more engaging and interesting for everyone involved?
Are there ways you could better clarify your expectations of team members before providing feedback or measuring their performance?
What opportunities do you have to provide feedback before high stakes performance reviews?

If you want to go more in depth, I have an online course on applying best practices from education to the workplace, and I’ve shared some of my advice for managers here.

If you found this helpful, you can also get a crash course on therapy here, and learn more about how managers can incorporate these best practices here.

Up Next: Crash Course on Being a Craftsperson

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