The Rules
1. Be kind: all else is details.
2. Remember that you are not your learners…
3. …that most people would rather fail than change…
4. …and that ninety percent of magic consists of knowing one extra thing.
5. Never teach alone.
6. Never hesitate to sacrifice truth for clarity.*
7. Make every mistake a lesson.
8. Remember that no lesson survives first contact with learners…
9. …that every lesson is too short for the teacher and too long for the learner…
10. …and that nobody will be more excited about the lesson than you are.
Greg Wilson – Teaching Tech Together
Teaching Tech Together is an excellent resource for teachers of all subjects. Recommended.
*This may sound wrong, but Wilson’s point is that simplification is vital for teaching and learning, and mental models necessarily develop in stages:
“… a mental model… is a simplified representation of the most important parts of some problem domain that is good enough to enable problem solving. One example is the ball-and-spring models of molecules used in high school chemistry. Atoms aren’t actually balls, and their bonds aren’t actually springs, but the model enables people to reason about chemical compounds and their reactions. A more sophisticated model of an atom has a small central ball (the nucleus) surrounded by orbiting electrons. It’s also wrong, but the extra complexity enables people to explain more and to solve more problems.”