Maybe you have been asked to run a craft workshop in your local library. Maybe a yarn shop has asked you to teach classes. Or maybe you teach regularly but feel like picking up a few tips. Either way, this blog post is for you.
Hello, I’m Karie Westermann and I teach knitting workshops. I teach all over Europe and I’ve been a mainstay on the knitting workshop scene for many years. Prior to that, I ran technical writing workshops at a university and taught Business English in various corporations. I’m also a qualified Adult Learner instructor.
First, a few things:
• This blog post will not give you a fully-formed class for you to run.
• I will not be teaching you how to teach. That is not my remit.
• I will primarily be talking about knitting, but this post is applicable to many types of crafts. If you are a quilter, stitcher, crocheter, or whittler, you will be able to take these tips and tricks and apply them to your craft. I’m just not qualified to talk about your specific craft.
Where To Start
So, you’ve been asked to teach or maybe you are pitching a workshop somewhere. Where do you start?
Begin by establishing learning objectives.
Let’s say you have been asked to teach Beginner’s Knitting. What learning objectives do you have for that topic? Make a bulleted list. It will probably look something like this:
Cast on
Knit stitch
Purl stitch
Decrease
Increase
Cast off
That’s a logical list of basic knitting skills, right? I’d argue it’s also very ambitious for a one-off beginner’s session, but that is a talk you need to have with yourself.
Remember: always question your own assumptions; you are not teaching yourself.
For each of these learning objectives, writing down exactly what you will be teaching and how. Think logically about how each learning objective feeds into the next.
Cast on
Which cast-on is easy to master and won’t be hard to knit into? The cable-cast on requires the student to make the knit stitch already which might be a bonus, but might also be confusing because you are twisting the cast-on stitch and ..
Knit stitch
Okay, so if I use the cable cast-on, I can use it as a springboard for talking about the knit stitch and how..
Turn Learning Objectives Into A Narrative
For every workshop you run, you should have a list of learning objectives. These objectives need to form a logical narrative where each learning objective feeds into the next. To your students, this narrative may not always seem obvious, so make sure to signpost during your class.
By “signposting” I mean that you need to explain why you are doing what you are doing. To use the example above, you explain that you chose the cable-cast on because it lets the student attempt a knit stitch before they even know that they are doing it. It is empowering as a student to realise that you already have (part of) a skill you are seeking to master.
Having an established narrative also helps you time manage. You know which story beats you need to hit in which order so that your student can leave feeling confident about their new skills.
Story beats? “.. the points of action upon which you hang your basic story. When you connect the actual individual action points, they build up to story..”
By having identified objectives build into a narrative, you will have natural story beats to hit: the cast-on, the knit stitch, the purl stitch. This enables you to allot time to the various objectives and hopefully also make you think about how many objectives you can realistically slot into a workshop.
Why Learning Objectives Help You Help Your Students
This is important. Having established learning objectives also makes it possible to tailor workshops to each student’s needs as you can easily identify additional objectives if a student is ahead of the curve. Likewise, you can also pare down your list of objectives if a student want to dedicate more time to a particular skill.
Making Workshop Sheets
Handouts are important. I have seen a lot of handouts in my time — both when I take workshops myself and when I tidy up a workshop room at a festival. There are no right or wrong way of making handouts, but I have some tips.
Make sure the Workshop Sheet Supports You - Not The Other Way Around
One of the quickest ways to kill the flow of a workshop is to sit and read aloud from a handout along with the students, then walk around to see if they can follow the handout instructions. People might as well learn from a on-line tutorial together with a friend.
Use the handout to support your teaching, don’t let your teaching support the handout.
Make sure all the important points are covered in the handout, but the students are there to be taught by you rather than your writing. Show the techniques with your hands and then help your students. The techniques can be detailed in your handout, but the handout should never take precedence.
If you are teaching something less technique-based (say, Design A Sweater), you should have all the relevant numbers and details in your handout — but keep your teaching focused on your whiteboard and teacher/student interactions.
Likewise, don’t hand out 15 pages of dense text. That is not a handout; that’s a chapter in a book.
White Space & Layout
Leave plenty of space in your handout for notes. Students will want to write their own thoughts. Students might also find it easier to remember a technique if they can write down in their own words how they are doing something.
Make sure there are logical breaks in your handout (learning objectives, anyone?) and there is plenty of white space between sections. It’s a nice visual shorthand way of saying “hey, we are shifting gears here”.
If you are including a pattern with your handout, give it space to breathe.
Finally, some people like to include lots of photos in their handouts. I only add photos and illustrations, if they add to the narrative. Do not include visual clutter. Keep your use of fonts to a bare minimum as well.
Why A Good Handout Helps You & Your Students
If you use your handout as a crutch, chances are that your students will be so focused on reading the workshop sheet that they forget to listen to what you are saying. You will end up repeating yourself several times, losing valuable time to hit those beats.
A good handout leaves the students free to pay attention to you as you present a technique or explain a calculation, but also enables them to check back on something you said earlier. Crucially, the handout should support them when they are back home and want to refresh their knowledge.
The perfect handout is short, to the point, and helps guide you and your students through the learning objectives.
Some Tips On Class Sizing
There is no magic number when it comes to how many to have in your class. If you are relatively inexperienced, you might limit yourself to four or six. Sometimes the workshop room won’t take more than eight people. Sometimes the type of class limits the number of participants because it is extraordinarily hands-on (such as a spinning wheel class for beginners). I like having a lot of people in my workshops because it suits my teaching style and personality. There is no magic number.
Full-Day versus Half-day & Class Sizing
Running a class as a half-day class does not mean you should have half the number of students as you would in your full-day class. Running a half-day class means you should have half the number of learning objectives as you would in your full-day class. It does not reflect upon how many students you are teaching.
A full-day class should be thought of as an extension of a half-day class. You have the same narrative (“learn to knit”) but you can expand upon the learning objectives. I prefer to have the same essential narrative, but add more objectives within that narrative.
Remember this list?
Cast on
Knit stitch
Purl stitch
Decrease
Increase
Cast off
For a half-day class I would probably have it read as
Cast on
Knit stitch
(Purl stitch)
Cast off
And the full-day version would probably read something along the lines as this:
Cast on
Knit stitch
Purl stitch
Ribbing
(Seed Stitch)
Cast off
Understanding a basic pattern
It would look the same whether I was teaching six people or twelve people — or twenty-four. The rate at which someone is learning a new skill does not change. The only thing that changes is how much 1-2-1 time you are able to allocate.
How I Think About Class Sizing
I feed off the energy of my students when I teach. The more energy there is in the room, the better. When you teach, one of your tasks is to feed energy into the room: make the students curious, make them ask questions, and make them eager to take on the tasks at hand.
Class sizing is often thought of as “how many people can I realistically get around offering 1-2-1 tutoring”. I invite you to also think of it in terms of energy, about interactions, and about how you create a learning environment. You as a workshop tutor is just a catalyst — the person that creates a learning reaction in your students — and your job is to gather enough substance that your students can make that reaction happen. It is a terrible analogy, but one I often think about when I step into a workshop room.
So, rather than think about the (very essential!) 1-2-1 interactions you will need to have with your students, also think about what kind of class sizing enables you to provide the kind of learning environment that your students need. Some students are outgoing, other students are shy. How can you create a learning space in which both kinds of students are comfortable — and do so within the confines of your physical environment? How does that correlate with the number of students?
Some Basic Teaching Tricks & Tips
Finally, some basic tips and tricks.
Teaching is mostly about REMOVING the fear.
I’ve taught many, many different topics over the years to a huge variety of people. Underwriters, bankers, architects, design students, university lecturers, ad executives, politicians, lawyers, nurses, engineers, and so forth. It doesn’t matter which topic or in which context I’ve taught, everybody’s all got the same basic fear of learning something new. Children don’t really have this fear because everything is new, but once you reach adulthood that fear creeps in.
The important thing a workshop tutor needs to do is break down that fear. Granted, craft workshops are not the most troublesome because people have generally chosen to participate, but there is still fear of the unknown and fear of looking/feeling stupid. Occasionally you will also encounter lovely students whose participation in the workshop is their way of facing other fears.
Creating a safe, loving, and kind workshop environment is your top priority.
How do you do that? I like getting to know people in my class and finding out where they are coming from. Then I am just my own goofy self and tell my goofy stories. It seems to work. You will want to find your own approach and figure out how to make your students feel comfortable enough to make mistakes in front of you.
Find Your Teaching Style And Personality
You need to be able to project your voice and control your classroom. Sometimes you will be facing ten rowdy knitters who are all hell-bent on driving you insane (in a good way), and you need to be able to command attention. Because you have 30 minutes left and they still need to learn how to cast off.
Over the years there have been many talk about different teaching styles and learning styles. I happen to think these styles are mostly snake oil being peddled by companies wanting you to sign up for useless courses. However, you can take what’s useful from these models and discard the snake oil aspects.
Expert/Authority: Best exemplified by the quilting workshop tutor I once had who snarled “I’ve been doing this for forty years!” at a workshop participant who asked a question. Please do not do this. If you need to set yourself up as an authority during a workshop, something has gone terribly wrong. You should know your subject matter very, very well and if you get a question you cannot answer, say that you simply do not know but you will look it up and help them find the answer. There is much more authority to be found in that style of teaching than in asserting superiority based on numbers you’ve been teaching.
Formal Teacher/Lecturer: In craft workshop terms, this is suited for show-and-tell events rather than hands-on learning. If you have a fascinating story to tell, a slideshow can be a great way of engaging with people. If you want to teach a particular knitting technique, the lack of student interaction will be a massive drawback.
The Delegator: if you have groups of students that are at very different levels, it can be a useful technique for keeping everybody happy. Say, you are teaching Shetland lace shawls: one group of students has knitted a lot of lace and is keen on getting to the next level; the other group has never knitted any lace before but is keen on getting the basics. Delegating different learning objectives to the different groups is a great way of keeping both groups on their toes without alienating anybody. It also lets the students interact with each other which can be very giving and fruitful for everyone concerned. I tend to pull the groups back and give them a common learning objective after a while. It is important not to let the workshop become one big group work session.
The Facilitator: Encouraging students to ask questions and giving them hands-on tasks that’ll give them moments of self-discovery should be core skills of yours. This style of teaching is best if it leads to workshop discussions and student-to-student interactions. It is a lot harder if the layout of the room has students sitting back-to-back. Facilitating knowledge can also be hard for some students who expect you to lay down the law regarding techniques. I find this style of teaching is fantastic if you are running classes that encourage curiosity and creativity; less fantastic if you are running classes where there are definite answers to definite questions.
As the workshop tutor, your job is to blend these styles (and the many other styles you’ve observed over the years) with your own personality — and the workshop you are teaching.
In terms of finding your teaching personality, you might find that you will adapt aspects of your personality. I am incredibly shy when I am not teaching and I find it difficult to make small-talk. However, as a teacher I am goofy, open and warm. I emphasise aspects of my own personality that are usually bubbling away under my shyness and pull out personality traits that only my close friends know.
Record Yourself
Set up a camera and film yourself while you are teaching. You might want to rope in a few friends and practise on them. How do you come across? Do you need to work on your voice projection or do you need to quieten down, so you give other people a space in which to talk? Do you facilitate a learning space or do you delegate a space? What is your body language like?
Remember this: you are not the focal point of the class; the learning objectives should always be the core to which you return.
I hope this helped. If you have any questions or queries, please leave a comment below!
I’ll be updating my workshop schedule later this week, so keep your eyes peeled for that. And if you like my writing, you can join my Patreon for essays on making and creativity.