Learn to teach

March was a month invested in education. I enrolled in a Certified Pedagogy Course that enables its graduates to become certified instructors. It starts out by everyone preparing and doing a 10-minute long presentation on any subject they feel comfortable with. Everyone gets to see the presentation recordings and comment on them.

Afterwards, the class embarks on a month-long voyage exploring several subjects on pedagogic and evaluating techniques, on digital assets, on establishing goals and learning how to empathize with different kinds of classes and individual students. Each module adds a little bit of knowledge that the students will apply on a final 20-minute presentation to the class, in which they showcase their mastery on being an excellent instructor.

My final presentation had to do with everyday sketching. By using simple geometric figures, everyone in the class had to do a portrait of their facing colleague in tiny squares of sticking paper. Then, they would stick the portrait into a scene, which I had prepared previously, so that a group portrait of the classroom would result. The conclusion? With simple figures and no great effort involved, people with no drawing experience whatsoever managed to do a collective portrait of the classroom, individually and as a team. They managed to overcome their fear of sharing their drawings, largely because everyone was on the same level and everyone was expected to contribute.

During the final class, we had the chance to analyse recordings from our final presentations and comment on the success of everybody becoming excellent certified instructors. Celebrations were held in a restaurant nearby, where I was challenged to appear in one of my own sketches.