What Everyone Ought To Know About Teaching Others.

Gone are the days when teaching others had to be in a classroom or be a professional teacher before one could teach. There is a saying which says being a teacher has to be a lifetime learner and so is the lot of every developer. We constantly learn new things on a daily basis and out of the wealth of knowledge that we possess, some if not all can be passed on by teaching others.

Teaching basically means passing on acquired knowledge to somebody else. However, there are some benefits the teacher stands to gain but most people don’t quite realize these benefits. In this article, I’ll be pointing out some of these benefits and by the end, I hope I would succeed in convincing someone into teaching some of the things they already know. Below are some benefits associated with teaching;

Benefits

• Helps solidify learning.

The best way to learn is by teaching others what you have learned. Explaining what you have learned to someone else will force you to reword i.e. put it in your own word and helps in revisiting it from the ground up. It is also a perfect way to test if you’ve truly internalized something.

Sharing both the newly learned skills & knowledge helps to solidify the newly acquired knowledge in your brain. Even as a beginner you have something to teach and you don’t have to be an expert before you start.

• Better understanding.

Another thing it does is that you get the chance to go through the topic again from the basics and you get to learn and understand some concepts you struggled with on the first try.

For example, I remember the first time I learned the CSS box model, I don’t quite understand it fully and because of the pace and lots of things that I needed to learn, I couldn’t get the opportunity to revisit it but as I decided to start teaching & mentoring others, I have to revisit the topic, you can’t give what you don’t have, my point here is if I don’t understand this concept myself how can I teach others, you don’t want to appear incompetent before your students I guess not. This gives me an opportunity to revisit the topics for better understanding.

• Confidence in explaining technical concepts.

You get better at explaining technical & communicating technical jargon to a layman to the point of understanding and also improve your communication skills.

Teaching advantages

• Perform better in programming interview questions
  — Those basic interview questions that throw people off their game after learning so many advanced programming concepts will have stuck after teaching it to others.
• It also increases metacognitive self-regulation, conceptual formulation of problems, and, eventually, the ability to solve those problems you can check the following citation for more info.
• It makes one a continuous learner & opportunities for growth
  — Teaching others make you a continuous learner, as they say, no good teacher will ever feel that they truly know everything there is to know. Basically, you become a lifetime student and this gives room for continuous improvement and career growth. Also positions one as a domain expert in one area of specialization.
• Opportunity to make a difference in someone's life e.g khan academy, Freecodecamp, etc., read a couple of testimonies online from CS students learning Algorithms & Data Structure and other complex subjects on YouTube from a random guy in India whose college does not teach very well. Thanking this individual for the impact those teaching have in the career.

Ways you can teach

• Writing articles or blog posts
  — An article about a problem you recently solved, what was the problem, and how you solved it?
  — The most significant technical lesson that you have learned in your journey as a developer that can help others?
• Creating YouTube tutorials
• Teach fundamentals to beginners in your field of expertise
• Mentoring Juniors
• Creating a podcast about topics
• Participating in a group discussion

And there you have it, I hope you find the article resourceful and very helpful.

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Thanks for reading.