Should I become a teacher or not? We help to overcome fears, negative experiences and understand whether you need it
Only on October 2-5, OTUS opens up the opportunity for all IT specialists to take a place in the course group for free “Online teacher”… Classes start on October 29. In the meantime, we have prepared an article that will help you navigate whether you need this career step and what awaits you on our preparatory course.
Hi, I’m Dasha Vyunova, head of the methodological department at OTUS. First, very briefly about the bonuses that an IT specialist receives from teaching. Perhaps everyone knows them: additional income, grateful audience and fame in their field, the opportunity to better understand the subject yourself.
We all often hear something like: “To reach the heights of mastery, you need to share knowledge.” True, it is not necessary to become a teacher and create your own course, there are a lot of alternatives: to be a mentor to a beginner, speak at conferences, blog, in the end, suggest solutions on StackOverFlow.
Of all the options, being a teacher is the most difficult, requiring serious preparation. It happens that a person wants to try himself in this business, but at the first failures and difficulties he is disappointed and decides: “Teaching is not for me.” But enough correct expectations and attitude – and now all difficulties cease to seem like an insurmountable wall, but turn out to be a door that remains to be opened and passed on.
So, if you have been looking at teaching for some time now: getting a job at a university, in an online project or opening your own courses, you are probably worried about one of these questions:
Will I enjoy teaching? Do I need it?
Do I have the right ability to teach others?
Will I be a good teacher?
Will I have enough time for this case?
How can you check that the students have really learned the material?
Are my classes really useful skills?
How to improve the effectiveness of lessons?
You are unlikely to come up with theoretical reflections. And someone could have had a negative experience: they sat for several days preparing, but the lesson was crumpled, and you are not even sure that the audience benefited from it.
Therefore, the main thing for us on the course is to provide a safe space for experiments, where the specialist tries to teach classes and listen to their feelings of “like / dislike”.
What I recommend to tune in if you decide to try yourself as a teacher (for the first time or again):
Long preparation for lessons. Some of our novice teachers say that they spend 3-5 hours to prepare a half hour demo lesson. This may scare someone away, but in fact everything is here, as in any other discipline – the more energy you put in at the start, the faster you will achieve good results. Pretty soon, including with the help of our instructions, you will learn how to reduce and optimize your time spent without compromising quality.
Teaching is a fun yet challenging art to master. Even if you are an experienced speaker and give talks often, it is still not the same as teaching a group. Open up to receive knowledge! Then, to your public speaking and / or mentoring skills, you add the ability to plan sessions, engage your audience, measure results, and more.
Work on yourself… You don’t need to learn much about the rules and techniques for organizing classes. It will take much more effort to follow them. Teaching will be easier if you get in the right place to work with your habits. For example, learning not to stray from the topic, work with the tempo of speech, improve punctuality or train attentiveness – each has its own characteristics.
Many things come with confidence. By the time of the third demo lesson, many future teachers have already mastered it enough: they remember to ask students to turn on the cameras, use interactive elements, manage audience engagement and improvise.
If all these 4 points resonate with you, and of course, you have professional knowledge and a desire to share them, then it makes sense to try yourself in teaching.
Course program “Online teacher”
Now let’s take a closer look at how we train teachers. I have already said about the first: this is a safe space where you will learn and practice various skills necessary for organizing and conducting classes. Before reaching real students, future lecturers practice in demo classes for fellow students and receive recommendations from a methodologist.
You will go through the following topics:
Teacher activities
Public speaking: presentation and speech
Giving and receiving feedback orally / in writing
Knowledge, skills and their indicators that form the learning goal
Differentiation of training participants: monitoring, motivation, involvement
Lesson planning: structure, dynamics, life hacks
Creation of educational tasks (test, interactive in the lesson, DZ, project)
Assessment of activities in the classroom, criteria for achieving the goals of classes, self-assessment
The last lesson is summing up and analyzing cases.
In a month, teachers master all the necessary knowledge – all that remains is to practice on the demo in order to gain confidence and feel ready to go out to the students.
What awaits the specialist after the course?
There is an option join the OTUS teaching team… We have many options for participation: teach in one course or teach on a couple of specialized topics in different courses, or even develop our own course and assemble a team for it. Some do not want to lecture and work with us as mentors or mentors, checking homework and communicating with students individually.
This is an opportunity, not an obligation, so once you prepare, you decide where to use your skills.
By the way, if a person is trained and understands “not mine” – this is also a valuable result that brings him closer to what he wants to do.
Only October 2-5 we made a course “Online teacher” free for all IT specialists, timed to coincide with the Teacher’s Day. The special offer applies to the group starting on October 29th. To take a seat, you need to answer 3 questions entrance test and send your registration e-mail to us via telegram: @Otushelp_bot, after which the manager will contact you and enroll you in the course.
We are waiting for all talented and experienced Habrovites in the classroom. And we hope that from next year Teacher’s Day will become a professional holiday for some of you!
