Hey friends, welcome back to this podcast. Today we are releasing under the name small school podcasts because well, if you're listening to this, we just rebranded very exciting. So this podcast is where we learn how to offer unreasonable learning experiences. So thank you so much for being here.
You know, early in my journey as a teacher, I had a very, very important moment. Someone told me this. Kevon, your writing has a lot of authority. I love it. Today, you lost a big chunk of it.
So, this was when I was running a live cohort for the first time. And then I had the first live call, I was not confident at all. I was constantly nervous and asking people for feedback. So this student was amazing and she stayed behind the call to tell me
To say that I was a little sad was pretty much an understatement because I know that I need to level up as a teacher. But then to really have someone to tell you right in front of your face, that's next level. Honestly, that hurt.
today I want to just looking back to this story and tell you about my journey going from someone who had, you know, bare minimum teaching experience to now being someone who is like creating courses, writing books, to share my knowledge to so many other people. And I will wrap it up with two big lessons for you. One as a teacher and one as a student as well.
So let's go back to why I decided to get on this education path. You know, in my career, I have always been a starter person, you know, from zero to one building things out of thin air. That's me. For four years in my career, I actually spent in a kids coding school and I joined as an employee and slowly worked my way up, and actually pretty soon like in about nine months or so I became the left-hand person of the founder and that really opened up my eyes to education and to nurturing kids.
I think that's also the reason why I just love parenting and raising kids so much. From that experience, I learned how to run a classroom. From designing the courses to designing the live classes. To actually figuring out how to excite the kids. That's really something that I've never touched on upon in the past.
I never really imagined myself to be a teacher. An educator myself, you know, that would be miles away from my dream job or something. I learned so much about that experience that, you know, slowly, maybe as I get older, I get pretty drawn to that whole education experience, like to be able to see someone going from point A to point B, amazing feeling.
And then, during COVID at the end of 2020, when I started writing and sharing online. I decided that it was time for me to maybe try teaching a little bit because that's the most natural way to extend when you are already creating a ton of content. So that was when I started my first cohort. As I said, I'm a startup person, so I move fast and break things.
I was having no curriculum. I was not sure what to teach, but I decided, Hey, let's start my first cohort. Let's make it free. Right? Because I don't have any promises that I can make and if I can get 20 people to sign up and they trust me enough. Okay, that's good. That would be a testing ground for me. So I did exactly that.
And of course, I didn't do it from nothing. I was already having a bit of an audience because my free Build in Public Guide was a pretty good hit. So people were really interested in, you know, really taking the step to build in public, to grow their audiences, to tell their stories as well. Once I created that first cohort, I was super nervous. I created the curriculum week by week, just right before the live calls and I think because I haven't run the workshop once before. So it was really hard to be comfortable because you know that, wow, how can I improvise when I'm so unfamiliar with the materials and I wasn't really equipped with the right facilitation skills or teaching skills? So that added more anxiety to me.
Eventually cause of that student to stay after the call and told me the real feedback, Kevon, you lost a lot of authority today on these live calls. Again, I was hurt, but I wasn't surprised because teaching; to be able to create learning experience is not something that's easy. I think a lot of people online these days, they make it sound so easy.
Like you can create content, you can just package your information, your knowledge into a product, and then you can put it on, you know, Some kind of funnel sales funnel and you can make a lot of money.
If you want to be a good teacher, if you want people to come back. That's not enough.
I learned it the hard way. So that was the moment I decided, I'm not just a creator. I need to be a creator educator. I need to level up As a teacher, I need to level up as a facilitator because only if I have these two skills, then this business would be able to go to the next level. So I still remember that was a pretty good timing because maven.com was a platform that is up and coming. It was creating a lot of traction in the cohort-based course space. They were having this program where they train people to be teachers so that they could teach on their platform. The program was called Maven Course Accelerator.
And that really showed up at the right time because I had experience running those cohorts, but of course, I need to level up myself. So I filled in the application and then I got in.
I was maybe cohort three or cohort six. I couldn't remember, but basically that Maven course accelerator. Who really opened up my eyes about what is possible out there, you know, the teaching techniques, the facilitation techniques, how do you warm up the room?
How do you excite the room? Even though everyone is just staring at the screen, how do you, you know, get their attention? How do you get people to buy in? How do you get people to stay awake instead of sleeping? Wow. There's so much to learn. I think a lot of people would know that in our space. Just by seeing how people do it, you can already learn a lot. So I definitely picked up a lot of techniques from just being in that accelerator. Another key learning is that when you run a cohort-based course, people usually think it's live calls.
but a lot of the learning design is actually outside of the live calls. Like, Would you give any homework, pre-work to your students? Do they need to come prepared? What should they do after the live calls? This is also very important. So that was my story going from someone who was a pretty bad teacher, pretty bad facilitator to someone who's like finally getting a hang out of it. And then I, of course, ran many, many more cohorts and students were having a blast.
That transformation was really important. What I want to tell you, no matter what stage you are in, in creating your creative education business is that you don't know what to improve or how to improve unless you're suffering yourself. This is a huge part because if you're not suffering enough, you wouldn't know the urgency.
You wouldn't have the urgency to really improve on that thing. So it's very important that you always do it first while knowing that you won't do it well, but you still do it because when you do it, you suffer, and when you suffer, you know what to improve, I think that's a huge thing. A huge, huge, huge lesson learned for me.
So let's imagine if you are just starting out creating courses, don't really worry about how perfect the first course is. I can tell you that you'll be refueling, you'll be reteaching a lot of times. So just focus on how to deliver value to the student and observe and reflect and improve. And you can do it better the next time.
So I think one of my earlier mistakes was I spent too much time overengineering each part, then they really went to waste really soon.
The second lesson is really from a student's perspective. Because I think since we're all teachers, we have to be students in order to stay being a good teacher. If you are taking courses, please only take it when you need it. There's a phrase for this called just-in-time learning.
I know a lot of people who love reading books or taking courses and they would Kind of rely on taking courses to get better themselves.
But this is actually bad because most of the time they don't know what they want to improve on. So they, they're just kind of getting more knowledge, but then they're not really, Applying the knowledge right away because, you know, they didn't get in with a very specific problem to solve. So I call that procrastination.
Like you're just learning for the sake of learning. I don't buy it. I buy the just in time learning approach where you know exactly where you need help. And you find that course to help you with that and it shouldn't be a big course. It should be a small course. So this connects really well with how I think about running small school.
You know, the reason why I rebrand to small school is because have this belief that the online education space is just too fluffy, too big, too much stuff. Everyone jam pack more stuff into their course because they want to make it look like it's worth the price. They want to charge a higher price. But when I look around, you know, I ask people, I talk to people, I experienced it myself. Most people don't find value in those courses because they're Making circles in the videos, you know, they're you know Don't edit it well. So the future I believe is really in small. Small books, small courses. For text, maybe 30 page max. For videos, Maybe 60 minutes max. And the key is to solve one problem at one time. So when people see it, they would be like, Oh, I have this problem and I know this course can help me remove that problem and then move on. So by making it so small, people can move on. But I feel like a lot of education programs, they're not designed for people to move on. They're designed to keep people there. Sometimes even with a recurring fee, but we need to understand people are busy. You're busy. We all have a business to run so we have to change it. So if you're listening to this episode, we are launching small school really really soon and we have an opening special so Stay tuned to that and the easiest way to get that information to be up to date is to get into our newsletter.
So you can go to smallschool.is/newsletter up in there. And then, you know, we'll let you know what the special is. Thanks for listening to this. I hope this is helpful. Remember just in time learning.
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