Ladies & gents, my name is Brandon Stover, and I’m the founder of Plato University. Welcome to Theory into Action.
Theory into Action is designed to help you turn your wisdom into actionable education. Learn how to create online courses, design learning experiences, and build educational programs so your knowledge can impact thousands of people.
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Maybe you're in the middle of thinking about launching an online course, or creating some sort of workshop, anything where you're trying to take your expertise, your wisdom, and give it to other people.
However, there's probably some fears sitting in your mind, some beliefs that are holding you back from actually doing that.
Today I'm going to show some of the ones that I've had, especially going from being an architect to doing different things as an entrepreneur and moving into a realm of teaching others.
I didn't go get a degree in education. I've never formally taught in a classroom. However, I'm standing here before you today trying to teach you something.
If I'm able to get in front of the camera and do it, I promise that eventually you will be able to as well. Let's talk about some of the roadblocks that you may come up against.
So probably the biggest fear when you're going to create a course or start teaching something is saying, “I'm not an expert” or “I'm not smart enough to be teaching that.”
Really you're just feeling inadequate about the level of knowledge that you have and being able to transfer that to somebody else.
Reason 1: you're comparing yourself to the masters of this material. If you're trying to teach science, you don't need to be Richard Feynman in order to do so.
In fact, you may be targeting the wrong level of student to actually be teaching. Maybe you think that you need to be teaching advanced students, knowing everything there is about this topic. Instead, you may be better off teaching beginner students.
I know I've come up against this myself when I'm going to teach something and thinking that I need to keep learning, or reading material, or just keep consuming all this information so that I get a full understanding and then being trying to able to hand that understanding off to somebody else.
Reason 2: you haven't actually taken the time to sit down and write down everything that you actually know about a given topic.
You haven't taken the time to create a course outline to start structuring some of your knowledge. You're just holding this ideal in your head right now of what an expert is and how much stuff they're supposed to know about this.
In fact, you're probably focusing on the things that you don't know, the areas of your missing knowledge, rather than all the things that you do know. Let's say there's 100% totality of a subject. You may know 95% of it, but right now your brain is focusing on the 5% that you don't know, and for that reason you're thinking you can't teach it.
Reason 3: you think there's some sort of final level that you're going to reach, some final understanding where you know everything and you never have to learn anything else about this knowledge set.
The reality of the world is, is you always have to keep updating yourself. You always have to keep learning. So you're never going to know all the stuff. This doesn't mean that you can't go and teach other people about all the things that you do know.
Tactic 1: know who you're teaching and their level of knowledge.
Remember, you don't have to target the advanced students, you may be targeting beginners. In which case, you don't have to know everything in order to teach them.
You just have to be a few steps ahead of them, just know a little bit more knowledge than they do, in order to be able to help them. Just teach the material that you actually know.
Tactic 2: start writing a course outline.
Brain dump everything that you know about a topic and then organizing it in a way that students can logically learn. Then you're finding those gaps in your knowledge, the areas that you're not quite sure, but you know is going to be needed in order for your students to actually be able to apply the information and reach whatever learning outcome they have.
When you identify those knowledge gaps, this gives you an opportunity to go learn and fill those in before you actually create your course or teach it to your students.
However, this shouldn't hold you back from launching your course. In fact, as you deliver your course, your students are going to ask you questions, and these also become opportunities for you to learn more.
Tactic 3: learn from your students.
Have students update your knowledge by teaching you something. The act of teaching is a great way to learn. In order to teach something, you have to organize the information in your mind and be able to transmit it to somebody else. In doing so, you have to have a deep understanding of a topic.
So when a student is teaching you something they're organizing information in their head and they're starting to apply it. So in this relationship, you both get to learn. You both get to update your knowledge.
You may feel that you're not going to be engaging enough to actually hold your students attention, or have them actually want to finish the course.
You've gone through years of education, sitting in your desk, watching somebody up at the front doing direct instruction, talking with PowerPoint slides or at a whiteboard… and you ended up disengaged, bored and you didn't want to be in class. You think that you're going to give that same experience to your students.
You think this is the one and only way that teaching can be done. That's what everybody else is doing. So that's what I have to do in my teaching.
Not true.
There's a dozen different ways that you can go about teaching. Our goal here is to transmit the information for our students to be able to learn something and apply it in their life and be able to reach their goals. So any way that you can facilitate that is a great way to teach, even if it's not one of your standard ways of teaching.
Tactic 1: ask your students what they want to learn.
When you do so, you're engaging their intrinsic motivation. When they're intrinsically motivated to learn, they're going to stay engaged. They want to consume this information. They know that they can apply it to change their life with this..
I don't know about you, but when there's a topic that I really want to learn about, I will sit through any type of instruction in order to consume it.
One of my favorite ways to learn is by listening to podcasts and there's some hosts that just don't take the time to have good audio quality. The interview sucks. It sounds terrible. And if it's information I really want, I will sit through all of that just so I can get that information. So even though that the host wasn't engaging or the content makes me feel like I'm suffering to sit through, I will still sit through it. I'm engaged.
Of course we don't want to be that type of teacher and we want to make sure that we're somewhat entertaining and it's actually enjoyable to consume the content.
Tactic 2: using different teaching methods rather than your direct instruction.
Look into other ways of teaching. Look into ways that you've been engaged. Some different ways that you may be able to do this is things like project based learning or inquiry based learning.
Project based learning involves a little bit of direct instruction to give students an understanding of why they're doing this project. Then they're using the project in order to actually apply the information and gain a greater understanding of the information. This means that your students are actively engaged in doing something.
Inquiry based learning, you're presenting some sort of question the students are trying to figure out an answer to. Most of the time, the material that you're teaching will help them to answer that question. The students are engaged because they're curious about what the answer is. They're starting to think for it for themselves, and they're driven by that motivation to find the answer, tapping into that intrinsic motivation, which is going to keep them engaged.
Tactic 3: use active learning techniques.
I recommend starting with these 3 videos I created on 15 active learning techniques:
Let's say you're creating a 60 minute workshop. If you just speak at them for 60 minutes, by the end they're just going to zone out.
Instead deliver 5 minutes of direct instruction, where you're talking to them and going over a material. Then having them apply that information for 5 minutes, doing some sort of small activity or having them engage in active recall. Anything that's going to shift them from listening, passively taking in material, to engaging with the material, actively participating with it. These can also be done in an asynchronous course where people are taking it at their own pace, at their own time.
At Plato University, the way we design our course lessons is by having about 10 to 15 minutes of material that people are listening to and then having some sort of activity at the end where they apply that information. We recommend doing it daily so they get a daily habit of learning.
The philosophy behind this is having our students learn and then apply. Learn, apply. Learn, apply. Consuming information, and then applying it, trying to produce their knowledge.
You feel like you're going to sound dumb. You're going to look like a fool. You're not going to be able to articulate yourself in a way that your students will actually understand the information.
Maybe you've presented something in the past where you had bad speaking experiences. So you have a little bit of trauma there.
You’re saying, “I don't want to stand in front of somebody. I don't want to get in front of a camera. I don't want to get in front of these students and try and deliver this information. I'm going to fumble on my words. I'm going to look like an idiot…”
We've all been there, especially our first times speaking about anything.
The bigger reason: you've just not had enough practice yet doing it.
You've not had the practice of trying to articulate your thoughts and can feel comfortable performing it over and over and over again.
You've not learned the little skills that are going to help you comfortably do it, like organizing your thoughts beforehand and not just winging it when you get there.
Tactic 1: choose a medium that you're comfortable teaching in.
If you feel that you're not good at speaking, you're not going to get up in front of 500 people and try and teach a lesson.
In fact, if you don't feel like you're good at speaking, you can start with writing. Take whatever that you're trying to teach, and write a guide about that information. In doing so, it forces you to organize your thoughts and get it out on paper. By having organized thoughts, you can later take that writing and turn it into a lesson that you actually speak.
When I first started teaching, I actually started with podcasting. I could just get in front of a mic, nobody could see me, and I could have notes on my screen, and just sit there and practice articulating my thoughts.
If you go to Plato University, you'll see that all of our courses are audio courses. This allows me to take 60 minutes to record a lesson which will later be edited down to a 10 or 15 minutes.
Usually my recordings go something like this:
When that lesson comes out you think that I'm the most articulate wonderful person in the world. “Wow! Brandon just speaks with ease!” But instead I had all these screw ups along the way…
Tactic 2: create frameworks for yourself that you can put information into that you know people will understand.
In all of our courses at Plato University, and everything that we teach, including this article right now, we use the What, Why, How framework.
I know my goal with everything that I teach is I want you to understand the information and that I actually want you to be able to apply it to do something in your life. To change your life or change the world. So everything falls under the what, why, how framework.
Tactic 3: just practice doing the reps.
Your first ones are going to suck. I promise you anything that I tried to teach in the beginning, I was not very articulate. I probably did sound dumb and I probably did look like a fool. It doesn't matter. I probably wasn't teaching it to that many people. I'm still here. I went on to the next lesson and tried to teach something else. With practice, I got better at articulating myself.
With this practice you want to do what's called deliberate practice. You're not just practicing for practice's sake, but you're practicing in order to get feedback so that you can update your practice and make your practice better.
When you are delivering your lesson live:
After you've delivered your lesson or delivered your course, get verbal feedback from your students.
Asking these sort of questions and will give you feedback about where to update your lessons, about how to better articulate yourself.
I've definitely had this fear come up a lot. I’ve thought that I need to help my students with everything to absolutely change their life. That this knowledge needs to make them a completely different person.
This is debilitating…
Your students have goals and outcomes that they want to achieve. And you want to help them reach them. But you're not quite sure if you're going to be able to do so.
Well, as I was just showing in my fear, I want to help them change the world. I want to help them change themselves. Change their life.
Reason 1: When you say statements like that, you're taking on too much responsibility.
The teacher student dynamic is a relationship. Relationships require buy in and participation from both parties. You can't make them do the work. You also are not the person that knows best about how that information is going to be applied in their life. All that has to come from the student. That means you could put in a ton of effort trying to help that person, and you still won't be able to do it. Because they haven't put in their side of the effort. They haven't done their side of the participation.
Reason 2: you haven't been clear about how the knowledge is going to be applied in real life.
When our students learn this information, what is it they can actually do with that information?
Tactic 1: set expectations and be very clear about what the outcomes for learning this information will be.
What will your students be able to do with it? How can this information actually be applied in their life?
For example, in our How to Start a Podcast course, the learning outcome is starting a podcast. I know that by the end of the course, I want my students to be able to start a podcast. So I need to fill in the course with enough information that they're able to do that.
This is a completely different outcome from saying something like I want my students to be Joe Rogan and land a 200 million deal from Spotify… Yes, some of my information could help them on the path to doing that, but there's about a dozen other steps that they're going to need to do in order to reach an outcome like that.
So instead, my outcome is starting a podcast. I know with confidence that my course can help students do that. It's the same process that I've used to launch podcasts, and it's the same process that my other students have gone through, and they've launched podcasts using that material.
So know what you can and cannot help your students with.
Tactic 2: understand that you're not an all knowing, omnipresent being that knows everything there is to know.
We already covered this. We don't need to be that level of expert, right?
Instead, your job is more of a guide of your students learning. You're going to show them the path, and you're going to let the student walk it.
Practically, this is done in two ways.
Tactic 3: get feedback from students.
They're going to tell you if you've actually helped them accomplish something.
They're going to tell you if you've helped them change their life.
I promise every time that you hear this, you're going to get a little confidence boost in your own teaching. You're going to get that warm fuzzy feeling of “Oh my goodness! I just helped deliver some information, my student applied it, and they reached whatever goal they had and they changed something in their life.”
It's an amazing feeling. The more you get it, the more confident you're going to be in your teaching.
You put in all this time and effort into creating a course.
You're afraid you're going to launch it and…
Crickets.
Nobody's going to take the course, nobody's going to find the information, and your effort has gone to waste.
Easy. You’ve:
That's okay. There's plenty of things that we can do in order to overcome these.
Tactic 1: during the creation of your course, interact and ask students what they want to learn.
We're doing this for two reasons.
Tactic 2: start building an audience.
The best way that's done is by putting out free educational content. The best marketing is educational. When they consume your message, they should also be getting something of value with it. Give them little tidbits that allow them to change their life. The more value that they get from the free stuff, the more that they're going to want to go to your paid course.
They're going to say, “Oh my goodness, I get this much value. I'm able to do these sorts of things in my life with all this free stuff. What is the paid stuff going to be like? What am I going to be able to do with that?”
Again, excited and engaged to actually want to take the course.
Tactic 2: don't get locked in to the one way of doing things and to the single educational models that maybe you've consumed courses through.
For example, doing a video course that's just released on Udemy or Skillshare or Coursera. That is one way to deliver education. However, it doesn't have to be the way that you deliver education.
For example, I've taken some great courses that are actually email sequences. Every single day I get one email that delivers the lessons, I read that, and the very next day I get another email.
At Plato University, we use podcasts because of how widely distributed podcasts are. Anybody can get on their phone, download a podcast app, and get the RSS feed delivered right to their phone. As a result, our lessons have been listened to over 300,000 times. That means the effort that I put in to develop that course has not gone to waste. We also structure the podcast in a way that you consume one lesson per day, and you can continue listening to those lessons over the subsequent days.
Now I know getting in front of a camera, getting in front of students, and sharing your expertise can be really scary.
If you want somebody to help, support, and coach you through these challenges, then let's have a chat.
I can be your partner and help you turn your wisdom into actionable education.
Let's build something great together.
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