DanNorth.net

So it’s that time of year again. I’ve got a number of conferences and workshops coming up, ranging over all sorts of topics. I just popped over to Martin Fowler’s site (I’m doing a talk with him this week) and noticed that he has a much more organised setup than me. All his events are in a sidebar and there is a handy link if you want more details. Another idea to go on my to-do pile.

ThoughtWorks Quarterly Technology Briefing

• Manchester – 12 September 2007 <-- That’s this week!
• London – 20 September 2007

This is the second instalment in ThoughtWorks series of informal sessions aimed at technologists across the spectrum. Although calling it a technology briefing is a bit inaccurate because the title for this one is “How to Sell Agile to your Organisation”, which has far more to do with the themes of people, risk and change than with anything technological.

This is the talk I’ll be presenting with Martin so I can guarantee a lively session. In his own words: “As I detest selling anything to anyone it will be interesting to see how this talk works out.”

Details and registration info are on the ThoughtWorks website.

RailsConf Europe

• Berlin – 17-19 September 2007

A lot of Ruby folk seem to have taken to behaviour-driven development. This is almost entirely due to the success of the rspec project, which is in turn due to the enthusiasm and dedication of its developers and the community they have established.

A while back I wrote a story-level BDD framework for Ruby called rbehave which has since been integrated into the rspec project.

I’ll be helping rspec project leads David Chelimsky and Aslak Hellesoy present a workshop entitled A half-day of behaviour-driven development on Rails, where we’ll be demonstrating how rspec helps you write software that is focused on achieving an outcome. It’s at 8:30am on the Monday morning, so make sure you’re there first thing.

Expo-C Roadshow

• Växjö – 15-16 October 2007
• Karlskrona – 17-18 October 2007

Expo-C is one of my favourite events. It’s a small conference in south-east Sweden and it seems to attract an audience that really cares about what they are doing. I’ve done two of them now, on very different topics, and on both occasions I was very impressed with the quality of the attendees and the calibre of the other speakers. (I’m usually the only one there who hasn’t written a book.)

This time they are doing two mini-conferences back to back, in Växjö and then Karlskrona, with a tutorial day and a seminar day (six sessions) in each location. I’ll be running full-day tutorials on BDD in Växjö, and Coaching, Communication and Change in Karlskrona. For the seminar I’ll be talking about bridging the communication gap, based on a keynote I gave with Martin Fowler at QCon earlier this year.

I will also be learning how to pronounce “Växjö”.

OOPSLA

• Montreal – 21-25 October 2007

This will be my first OOPSLA. I’ve heard a lot about it and I’m a bit intimidated. By reputation it seems a bit more “cerebral” than most conferences. It will also be the first time I’ve ever presented JBehave at a conference. No mean feat considering I started writing it at the end of 2003! There’s perpetual beta for you.

My co-presenter is my ThoughtWorks colleague, friend and cybergoth Liz Keogh, the person responsible for getting JBehave to 1.0. I have huge respect for Liz; she manages to combine software with poetry. This isn’t a pretentious metaphor – she actually does combine software with poetry. She ran a haiku workshop at a previous ThoughtWorks away day that many of the attendees nominated as the highlight of their day. She also writes inspiring and inspired blog articles.

I’m only going because I want to see what Liz does when she’s let loose on a roomful of developers. I reckon we’ll end up writing haiku acceptance criteria.

And some others…

There are another couple of events in the pipeline that I will blog about nearer the time (January and February next year). After that I’m going to have a bit of a lie down.

Correction: I got the dates wrong for OOPSLA. Thanks Joshua Graham for putting me straight.
Another correction: My Swedish geography is appalling. Thanks Morgan Persson.

I was going to write about the various ways that people learn, and then my colleague Jeremy Stell-Smith wrote an excellent article describing one of my favourite learning models, so go and read that and I’ll see you back here shortly. Jeremy also alludes to Shu-Ha-Ri, another learning model based on repeating “cycles” of learning, found in Japanese martial arts (I haven’t linked to a single definition because there are a few subtly different ones around).

Ok, so why are learning models useful? To quote Edward de Bono, we should teach our children to learn. In other words, Learning should be on the school syllabus alongside all the regular subjects. I would go further and make it a core subject of every school year. There’s plenty of material about learning, memory and concentration to fill the lessons. But here’s the good bit: it would be an exponentially useful subject.

To start with, teachers would have to learn the syllabus material. As they were learning they would apply what they were learning to become better learners. At the same time as they were learning about learning, they would become intrinsically better teachers, because they would understand more about their role as facilitators to learning. Then they get into the classroom (or outside in a park, because they have learned the importance of physical environment to learning) and provide an exciting, engaging, varied and responsive introduction to learning.

But now it really gets exciting, because as the kids learn the techniques and principles of learning, they become more accomplished and voracious learners, and they understand the dynamics of how they are being taught. And not just in their Learning class, but in History, Geography and all the other subjects where we have traditionally learned and regurgitated reams of dull information by rote. They will have a vocabulary and an awareness about learning so they can communicate how they want to be taught. And their education becomes exciting and useful.

I spend quite a lot of my time teaching, whether in the form of coaching, workshops, conference tutorials (some poor Swedes had an entire day of me recently), internal training within ThoughtWorks, or on-site with a client, and I really enjoy it! I love creating an environment that encourages people to learn, and I love seeing the lightbulbs go on.

I’m lucky – I’ve had some amazing teachers and mentors, whether in school, my brief martial arts career or work – which has led me to invest in understanding the dynamics of teaching and learning, communication and rapport, feedback and change (particularly cultural or organisational change). Systems Thinking is another useful avenue to explore.

Studying how learning and communication works has definitely made me a better teacher. I’m still an enthusiastic amateur – I would never describe myself as an “expert” teacher, simply because there is still so much out there that I don’t know, and because I keep encountering people with different and inspiring teaching styles. I don’t believe it is an area you can ever fully “know”.

The best advice I can offer to anyone who finds themselves in a teaching role is this: learn to learn before you learn to teach. If your last experience of learning was History-by-numbers at school, then unfortunately that’s probably how you will end up teaching, and that would be a shame.