I am returning today from a month in Antigua, Guatemala, where I was studying Spanish for around 6 hours per day, 5 days a week. I have written elsewhere, including in my recent books, about the importance of learning languages and—perhaps even more vital—ensuring that throughout your adult life that you are always engaging at least semi-seriously in something that you are a novice at but want to become skillful at.
In short, I believe that the experience of going through the difficult and at times painful process of developing a new talent helps bring curiosity, humility, creativity, and a learning orientation to all areas of your life. It can be a powerful antidote to creeping self-importance, intellectual laziness, and being a know-it-all.
I am pleased to report that my Spanish language skills jumped from what I would call high beginner to high intermediate over the course of the last 4 weeks. (In the process, I got back to roughly where I was in 2004.) What I did not expect to learn from my instructor were some important and even profound lessons about effective teaching.
I had the good fortune to get individualized instruction from one of the best teachers at one of the best language schools in Antigua. Her name is Lourdes. While I have been, at times, an effective teacher, mentor, and guide in other contexts, she still taught me a great deal about what it takes to facilitate someone else’s learning.
Before I turn to what I learned from her about teaching, let me flag one insight and a related pitfall. We all have the potential to be teachers, even if we have not formally been put in that role. As parents, elder siblings, supervisors, colleagues, mentees, and friends, we can help facilitate other people’s learning and, more broadly, their evolution into their best selves. But, when you play this role without the formal designation of being someone’s teacher, you need to be careful about assuming that they want to be taught by you, or even by anyone.
I have seen some effective teachers and trainers sabotage a potential opportunity for effective instruction by jumping into that mode when their potential learning partner wasn’t ready. (I have made that mistake myself on occasion.) It’s always safest to ask someone whether they are open to be taught by you at a particular moment on a particular topic. Sometimes that isn’t necessary, as a person’s openness to being taught by you is obvious and assumed. If you enjoy teaching, that’s great—but don’t let your enthusiasm blind you to the need to get your ”students” on board with you being in that role for them.
Now, let me share what I learned from Lourdes about teaching. I have tried to generalize her effective practices so that they can be applied in any teaching or training context:
1. Vary methods. Lourdes would tend to spend about 20 minutes on a topic and usually use 2 methods to deliver it: for example, instruction at the white board and/or using a textbook, and then practice (usually structured conversations or drills). Sometimes, if the content was presented earlier, she would go right to practice (perhaps after a brief review of the material). After 20 minutes was over, we would pivot to another topic using another learning technique. (She would occasionally note that we would return to a topic we had just been working on later in the day, especially if I was clearly still struggling with some element of it.) As a learner, the shifting of topics and teaching methods 2-3 times per hour helped keep me engaged.
2. Alternate between levels of difficulty. In addition to varying methods and topics, she also seemed to alternate between highly challenging content and intensive/draining exercises and things that were considerably easier. The less demanding segments let me rebuild my confidence and recover my energy. She would tend to emphasize easier topics and methods as the day wore on, but in any one hour block there would be some more and some less challenging segments.
3. Read the learner’s mood and adjust. If Lourdes saw I was getting discouraged, she would be extra affirming or shift into something that could build my confidence. If she saw I was distracted, she would ask me if I needed an extra break. If I was doing great, she would push me a bit harder. If she sensed I wanted to engage in conversation, she would delay a grammar lesson. If I seemed to want to receive information and not have to engage in conversation or drills, she would focus on that for a time.
4. Take obvious joy in the learner’s progress. When I had small breakthroughs in my gradual mastery of Spanish, as I did throughout my 4 weeks of classes, she would celebrate them in ways that I found touching and motivating. She was clearly on my side rather than simply punching the clock or even worse, sitting in judgement of my wobbly intermediate skills and my “not quite what it once was “ middle-aged grey matter. It’s always nice to make people you admire and like happy; one way I could do that this month was to concentrate and to progress in my learning.
5. Don’t gloss over a learner’s errors or backsliding or their off days, but maintain a positive and supportive posture regardless. When I made errors, Lourdes would almost always gently correct me. She certainly noticed if I was regressing or struggling at any given moment. But she seemed to use those times to be extra affirming of what I was still doing right, and she avoided spending too much time on topics I was struggling with until I had rebuilt my confidence.
6. Try to make learning fun and build in laughter. We laughed a lot, mostly during our structured or unstructured conversations which are a natural element of learning a language. But even when we were doing grammar drills, we tried to find things to amuse us. Laughter tends to relax people, which is one reason why so many people make a joke at the beginning of a speech as a way of building rapport with their audience.
7. Be flexible in your approach. Sometimes I could see Lourdes shifting gears from her original plan for the day. (Another good practice of hers was to preview major exercises a few hours in advance so that I could mentally prepare for them if I wanted to.) Like all good teachers, she has a lot of things in her toolkit. If one wasn’t working on a particular day, she would take out another, rather than stick with something that was making me feel unsuccessful. To take one example, I think she sensed early in our month together that I did not have much bandwidth for homework given the other things I was juggling. So she never asked me to do anything between classes. I’ll bet that if I had asked for or seemed open to assignments between classes, she could have gladly given them to me.
8. Show interest in your student as a human being, and tailor the learning process accordingly. As the month wore on, Lourdes learned more and more about my likes, dislikes, relationships, hobbies, and life journey. Without being creepy about it, she would reference her growing familiarity with me as a way of showing how closely she was paying attention to me as a student and as a human being. That deepened my commitment to learning. She also used those insights to tailor her teaching so that I could learn things that I would want to and need to apply in my work and in my life. Showing real interest in me as her student also helped dial back whatever negativity I might be feeling at any given moment about what might seem at times like frustratingly slow progress.
If you want to learn Spanish, I highly recommend the San Jose del Viejo Spanish School and Lourdes as a teacher—though please don’t request her next August as I hope to monopolize her again! But more broadly, when you are in a relationship that has some element of teaching another person, see if you can channel some of your inner Lourdes and be more effective at facilitating someone else’s learning and growth. I am certainly going to try that myself.