How to teach a class

Many people find that at some time in their lives, they need to teach a class. It may be training people at work, volunteering at a school, or sharing a special skill with the community. School teachers aren't the only people who have something to teach! To be successful at your task, you need teacher strategies to organize and plan ahead of time to ensure that your information is clearly presented and understood so that the students genuinely learn.

1. Goal: First, write down your teaching goal. This should be general such as "To teach the HR department to understand the new computer system" or "To teach people to understand how to reduce their energy use."

 2. Objective: List specific, concrete, measurable things you want your students to learn. A great way to word this is: "The student will be able to . . ." For example: "to enter records into the computer program and save their work" or "to reduce gasoline use by 5 gallons a week."

3. Activities: Decide which tasks you need to do with the students to teach that objective. It may be to read instructions or an article, brainstorm and discuss as a group, and/or complete a hands-on project.

4. Act: After all the planning, comes the act of teaching the lesson. Be flexible. You may have assumed that your class would come with knowledge only to realize you need to back up in your lesson plans and review. For example, your students may need help double clicking a mouse before they can work Photoshop.

5. Assess: If someone gives a lesson and nobody learns, did that person teach? No. Give some sort of "test" at the end of the class to make sure your students understood and learned. It does not have to be a paper and pencil test. It may be reporting back to the group about how much energy they saved that month or demonstrating an understanding of the computer program with a sample project.