Let's talk about communication

The idea here is to gather suggestions that might help if you want to, or are about to, give a course, a class or a talk, and you are worried about how to do it. I put together some things I noticed over these years working with PyLadies Brasil, and maybe some of it is useful to you :) The post came out of a conversation in the PyLadies Natal group, so building these suggestions was itself a collective thing.

Este post também está disponível em português, no original.

One of the things I always do right at the start is ask what experience people already have with what I am talking about. Sometimes we assume one level and the room is at another, and a lot of information goes past each other. Sometimes I even prepare alternative material (or different exercises) that I can use depending on the experience of the people I am talking to: beginners, say, or people who know the concepts but have never used them in practice.

Something else that helps: whenever you use an English term, give the Portuguese equivalent too. We work in an area loaded with English technical terms, and it is good for people to know what “debug” or “webscraping” means, but dropping the term without a translation can make it harder for some people to follow. So when you say the English word, say the Portuguese one alongside it.

Sometimes we start from the assumption that the group already understands a certain concept, but let’s remember that this may be something our own experience taught us, and not everyone walked the same path we did. So I always try to explain the concepts I mention, and then ask people to tell me if they already know them, rather than the other way around, which is to say things and ask people to speak up when they don’t understand. Depending on the room, they may never signal that they are lost.

We also have a habit of repeating phrases that, in the end, only get in the way. Something I used to do a lot, and noticed is not good at all, is saying that things are easy: “okay everyone, let’s do this, it’s very simple”, “it’s really easy”, “you’ll be done in no time”… Those were phrases I spent a long time saying out of pure habit, until I noticed that some people get anxious, afraid of not understanding what was supposed to be “easy”, and freeze on the task (me included). Besides, you only find the subject easy because you have already studied it, worked with it and practiced it (right?). While you’re at it, try to drop “where are the people falling behind?”, “is anyone behind?”, “would you look at that”, “finally” and so on.

Another habit I’d suggest rethinking is asking “did you understand?”. These days I try to remember to ask “am I explaining this well?” instead. Changing the way the question is asked has a big impact. In this case, rephrasing the question reminds us that the responsibility for getting that knowledge across is ours.

Something else I do sometimes is break a problem into small pieces. When I teach an introduction to Python through webscraping, I split the problem into little parts. For example: “we got the text of the page, but we only want part of the content. Now what?” Then I explain how to slice strings in Python and ask them to tell me what the solution would look like. In the next step we find another problem, talk about some other Python feature, and discuss possible solutions.

But that is one option: splitting the problem and solving it together with the group, collectively. Sometimes I call people up to write the solution in front of everyone, and sometimes I save the whole problem for the end of the course and walk around helping. I noticed that last option is a bit harder when I’m alone or with only a couple of people helping out; in that case I prefer doing it together with everyone.

You can get a feel for which approach to use depending on the group. Buuut if you don’t “feel” it, that’s fine. We get a sense of what to do in each situation with time and experience, and by teaching different groups.

We talk a lot about feeling it, but don’t hold yourself to that either. Really, pay attention, and attention is how you notice things. In my first talk I was so worried about proving that I knew the subject that I said a pile of things nobody understood: the audience was beginners and I hadn’t taken that in. It shook me enough that ever since I’ve kept in mind how much I want my talks to be plural and democratic.

The truth is that for any relationship to work, we have to pay attention to the other side of it, right? The same applies to the teacher-student relationship. You may not know what to do in the moment, or how to handle a given situation, but you will notice it and you will care about doing better next time.