I recently had the opportunity to teach a public Tableau workshop. This event is part of our training where we choose a section to teach. Sections vary from Dashboard best practices, Joins and Unions, Actions and Interactivity, etc. I was tasked with Sets and Parameters, as this is an aspect of Tableau I am shaky on and wanted more practice.
This was my first time in a teaching setting, so I was very excited and nervous about how I would do. These are my takeaways and what I learned.
Everyone moves at a different pace
I went into this lesson assuming everyone would be at a similar level of Tableau experience; however, there was a fair skill gap among attendees. Although I didn’t plan for this, I tried to keep people engaged by urging them to complete further extra challenges I had included in the workbook.
Slow down and show your work
Although I felt I was moving at a comfortable pace, my co-workers said some people were lagging behind and that I was moving too fast, especially when clicking through my demonstrations. I realized I needed to slow down when using my cursor to click on elements, as many people would miss this. This led me having to demonstrate the action many times, taking up extra time. One thing that was beneficial was utilizing a zooming tool, ZoomIt, to zoom in on areas of the screen that were hard to see.
Not everything will go to plan
The next thing I learned was that everything will never go to plan. During my lesson, I had to go over sets and parameters and allocated around 20 minutes for each. However, as we started, I realized that sets would take much longer than expected. This resulted in sets taking up about 30 minutes of the session, leaving me only about 15 minutes to introduce parameters, arguably the more technically heavy section. I was only able to walk them through 2 demos and had to scrap the last one along with their in-class exercise. In hindsight, it would have been better to split these topics into their own sections rather than trying to squeeze parameters in.
Overall, teaching this session pushed me outside of my comfort zone, and I'd happily do it again as it was definitely a learning experience. Furthermore, seeing how all my fellow cohort members were so actively engaged in helping others and watching their own presentations was a testament to how far we have come in training, and I was so proud!