Teaching has always been a passion of mine, so when DS42 was informed about a training day on Power BI and Tableau for clients and the general public, I was pretty excited. While I'm used to 1-2-1 tutoring with teenagers, teaching a group of grown adults was going to require a slight adjustment to me teaching style.
I opted to lead the 90-minute, Introduction to Tableau session. Given that the class catered to beginners, my focus was on familiarising participants with Tableau's layout and locating some hard to find tools. We then delved into constructing basic graphs, formatting, labeling, filtering, and covering some very fundamental calculations.
Although some may already be familiar with some of these features, I wanted to ensure that everyone in the room felt comfortable to this foundational level. That way, my colleagues could confidently get stuck into more technical topics, knowing that the basics had been covered uniformly for everyone.
After dedicating a week to lesson preparation, I practiced on a family member who breezed through the content faster than expected. This unexpected pace made me realise the importance of having stretch challenges on hand for those who might finish earlier. It also highlighted the significance of practicing the lesson to have a more accurate idea of timings.
Based on this practice, I decided to remove some of the available hints in the starter workbook and incorporated those additional challenges involving Filters and Calculations.
During the lesson, we moved swiftly through some challenges, making use of those extra stretch challenges. These included building any suitable chart to find solutions to my given questions and building some relevant charts based on the participants day-to-day jobs, illustrating real-case uses.
Furthermore, encouraging the audience to ask questions throughout the day not only prompted me to think on my feet but also increased my confidence in my Tableau abilities as I realised I was able to handle more questions than anticipated as well as helping to troubleshoot issues. There's also a reassuring sense of support knowing you're not alone; if unable to answer, a fellow DSers and coaches are always there to lean on.
In conclusion, this training day enhanced my confidence in teaching broader audiences and presenting to unfamiliar faces. My advice for future cohorts would be to prepare and practice content, include those extra stretch challenges and stick to those key concepts that your audience can build future learning on.