Where to find people to teach
You can teach anyone who wants to learn what you already know.
You can find these students in many places, both online and offline. Here are a few strategies you can try.
Finding students offline
If you’re new to teaching, I recommend you start teaching offline first. When I say offline, I mean teaching people face-to-face.
It’s always better to teach offline first because you get immediate feedback from your students. You’ll know something is wrong if they go “huh?“.
Try to teach for free when you start out. It’s much easier to find students when you’re not charging. Here are three ways:
1. Give a talk at a meetup
Meetup organizers are always looking for volunteers to give talks or hold workshops. You can volunteer yourself. Most meetups will be happy to have you.
For example, go find Singapore CSS or Singapore JavaScript if you’d like to give a talk about CSS or JavaScript in Singapore. They’ll be happy to welcome you.
Don’t be afraid to stand in front of a crowd to teach. Don’t let your imposter syndrome stop you from teaching.
You can teach anyone who wants to learn what you already learned. It’s even better if you just learned the subject because you know how it feels to go through the process. You can spot the crumbling footholds.
For example, Shirlaine and Grace give a talk at Singapore CSS right after they learned how to use CSS Grid. They gave the same talk again at Junior Developers Singapore. Here’s a video of their talk. It was very well received.
You can give a talk too.
2. Create or join a study group
Studies group are great because you get to teach and learn from peers. There are many study groups worldwide. For example, there are freeCodeCamp’s study groups all around the world. You can join one if you want to. You can create one too.
If you want to study another topic, you can create your own study group too. If you do so, go ahead and invite people to join you at meetups. They’ll be happy to share your study group if its free.
3. Volunteer to be a mentor
You can teach anyone who wants to learn what you learned. Try teaching your friends or your colleagues if you have them.
If you don’t have friends or colleagues, you can also try volunteering at organizations that help people learn to code. One example of such an organization is Tech Ladies in Singapore.
Finding students online
There are two ways to teach online:
- Through articles
- Through videos
You can start with either medium. I started teaching through articles when I started learning to code.
Bear in mind that it is harder to teach online because of these three reasons:
- You don’t get immediate feedback because you can’t see your students
- You need to direct people to your article or video, and that can be pretty tough
- It’s harder to come up with topics to teach when nobody asks you a question
That’s why I recommend you start teaching by offline. You’ll know how to teach if you’ve taught a few people before.
But you can always start by teaching online if you wish to. I started that way myself. Just bear in mind you’ll see results slower.
Wrapping up
You can teach anyone who wants to learn what you already know. You can teach both online and offline.
Now go teach.
