Teaching for non-teachers

Post date: 2023-06-01 04:42:31

I have a new hire who is earnest and hardworking but is just not picking up what I'm putting down when I walk through processes and concepts with him. Can you recommend resources for me to learn to teach better/differently?

My job involves a fair amount of somewhat nuanced, judgment-based, semi-technical work (e.g. getting unclear/messy spreadsheets and turning them into a harmonized format, making decisions about what's in-policy based on a nuanced understanding of our rules, communicating questions back to data providers across a sometimes-difficult language gap). I have a team of two people that do this work, and have had folks rotate every 1-2 years since we started the team in 2019 so I've taught a total of five people to do this work over the last few years. I always struggle with the best way to communicate this material, and it takes longer than I'd expect for folks to get the hang of it. I think a lot of that is on me and my communication.

I've never been formally taught to teach, although I do try to emulate things I've seen others do (e.g. having the person I'm teaching walk me through their thinking, explaining why I do things a certain way, keeping clear records of prior transactions that are very accessible to anyone on the team as a reference, job aids in multiple formats like checklist/explainer documents/video). I also try to make myself very approachable for questions (and, based on the questions I get, I've been very successful at that), although sometimes at some point I find I need to push a team member to at least try to answer/research their question before coming to me so that they're familiar with other resources. I also try to encourage them to go to the other junior team member with questions, as it's helpful to both, although if I don't jump in sometimes with best practices, it can sometimes lead to shared bad habits going unchecked.

I have ADHD and struggled for years with traditional teaching styles (particularly lecture-style learning) so I'm extremely sensitive to the fact that different people need different types of resources and teaching. I think this new team member really wants to be successful, and I 100% share that goal, but I've hit an impasse where I can thoroughly walk him through a short/simple task including the "how" and "why" (encouraging him to take notes/recordings), show him the relevant resources, encourage him to ask lots of questions throughout, but then when I ask him to repeat it back to me or to take the next one solo, he just says some version of "I'm sorry...I just don't understand what I need to do here" and when I probe farther, his thinking is pretty jumbled. We haven't even managed to work our way up to the more judgment-call level tasks that I'm expecting him to be able to take on within the next month or two. Is there a "teaching 101" resource (ideally something relatively short/digestible) that you'd recommend so that I can work to communicate this type of information in a more clear or better-differentiated format?

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