I love teaching. It’s in my blood. Two of my sisters are school teachers. Both my parents are educators. Both my brother and I have taught at various points in our lives. My own experience came in the form of two years of teaching and instructional design at a technology training company. I taught web development and basic principles of graphic and interface design. It was a lot of fun.

I taught people of all skill levels, which was a huge challenge. Some people knew little more than how to send email or type up a resume in Microsoft Word. Others had a handle on such esoteric topics as object-oriented programming, which I only knew very little about. This vast range of knowledge and experience meant that I had to stay pretty nimble on my feet, being able to both support the beginners and encourage the advanced. It was a lot of fun though, and learning to think and communicate like that definitely laid the later foundations of how I approach my writing and work on this website.

Probably my favorite teaching technique I developed was something I called knowledge mapping. It’s especially well-suited for advanced classes. Basically what I learned is that the teacher needs to get out of the way at a certain point. All a teacher can really do once the students reach a certain level is act as a guide and sort of a cartographer. Knowledge mapping was normally done at the beginning of a new project or curriculum session. I would sit down with the class (usually 5-8 members) and instead of telling them what to do, we’d figure it out together. All I might have to go on was a project description. Often it was to be completed in a web-programming language with which I myself wasn’t even familiar. Typical knowledge mapping sessions would revolve around two things: what we had already, and where we needed to go. We’d then map out the holes in between the two and brainstorm ideas about how to get from here to there.

If the project for example required PHP and MySQL access, I would poll the class for experience in these areas. Those with more experience became resources for those with less. This served a double purpose: it would slow down advanced students, and force them to learn new ways of thinking about what they already knew by teaching and communicating it to one another. It also meant that the students developed networks of personal contacts they could mine in the future on job sites for reference and assistance. It was a means of moving their reliance from me the teacher to each other and ultimately themselves as well.

Another thing we’d do was work through the problem mentally using a programming language we all had experience with. We mainly taught ASP programming (pre- .NET days), so we would all walk through how this might be solved in one system. Then we’d look at the technical differences between languages, and figure out areas of possible disconnect between the two, highlighting these trouble spots in our collaborative knowledge map that we drew on the whiteboard. Again, this helped break them out of thinking according to only one language or system of programming. It trained them to analyze problems for their underlying structure, rather than just how they appeared according to one model. This meant that if they got to a job site and were pressed into working in a language they had no experience with, they wouldn’t flounder helplessly. They’d understand how to break it down into components and research and tackle them accordingly.

Once the whole thing was said and done, we’d go back and look at the knowledge map we created early on and see how our thinking had changed. In some areas it would be a very subtle shift, in others much more drastic. Analyzing these changes further reinforced underlying structures and problem-solving processes, and showed them hard evidence that as their ability and experience increased, the way they thought and approached things changed accordingly. Too many people think knowledge is a static thing, that once attained remains fixed forever. In the constantly changing field of web technology, this is never the case.

The reason I bring all this up is that I realized a few days ago how much I’ve recently been applying the “knowledge mapping model” to this website, and the conversations which have developed around it. It was totally an unconscious thing which came out of this sort of Socratic method I’ve been applying to myself and everyone else. And it makes utter sense also as an extension of my past experiences. I tend to forget that what’s happening now in my life is not a vacuum. It’s all one big interconnected web that I turn over and over, approaching from all directions throughout the years, personally to professionally.