First of all, thank you for the (indirect) reminder. The first couple times I taught the embroidery class, at the end I asked the participants how the class could be improved. I received specific constructive suggestions that helped improve future iterations of the class. I have forgotten to do that lately and you have reminded me how important that is.
Second, I’d like to point out that there are likely several possible contributing factors, and they have different solutions. In no particular order …
-
The instructor may be ill-prepared or not know the material. These situations are, AFAIK, uncommon.
-
The instructor may not be able to “teach” it in a manner that gets it across. A list of “best practices”, teaching help, and specific feedback from the participants could all help.
-
The participants may not have expectations that match what the instructor intended to teach. Writing a precise synopsis on the calendar is crucial to managing the expectations of the students. I have proposed to Nicole @uglyknees a voluntary template/checklist for CA instructors to use to remove some of the ambiguity in that. (EDIT: link added).
-
The incoming skill level of the participants may be so varied that the material isn’t suitable for all (like how could it be in that situation??) The calendar class synopsis should manage expectations for incoming skill levels.
-
Or the expectations might be exactly what the instructor intended to teach but it might not be what the student wanted. Our “compliance” classes are a good example of this - woodshop basics, MultiCam. The student understands that they are going to learn the basic operation of the machine controls, but they really want (more) hands on, or a basic woodworking class for instance instead.