A Hack for Teaching Drupal

How Do You Teach Drupal Without Inducing Confusion/Boredom Triggered Comas? Here's a rule that has never let me down:

Never interact with the drupal site in any way during a lesson

The person you teach needs to click on every menu link, fill out every form, and as they learn, its your job to start taking off the training wheels. At first, you'll have to point them to where to go to add a new taxonomy term, but make it a point to later ask them to add a taxonomy term, and see if they remember how to find it.

This "hack" works well for two reasons:

1) It prevents you from going into conceptual monologues

When I'm at the helm, clicking around, and "explaining concepts", its almost impossible for me to avoid inflicting a salvo of turd bombs on my hapless student. For a moment, read this: (if reading this text doesn't make you want leave this article, there's something wrong with you)

In Drupal, a node is a grouping of data, which we call fields. A node is different from a user, and block, because its content, which leverages drupal's rich nodeapi. On this page you can add, edit, and manage node types using these tabs. By clicking "edit" I can edit node settings, like whether I want comments to be threaded, or flat. Isn't that exciting? By clicking "manage", I can add new fields to my node, which can be of many types including, text, number, decimal, computed. These fields have rich set of options, including setting the maximum length, making the field required, and even entering in custom validation code for node form submits.

Not only is this a terrible way to teach, best case is that your student is completely lost (probably on something as simple as the difference between nodes, and node types, the fact that a "field" is a specific CCK concept, and not a form element), but most likely, they are not paying attention anymore. Monologues + projectors = brain death.

Let your students direct what you are teaching them

Don't teach them about blocks. Teach them how to put that new announcement in the right sidebar. Don't teach them about views.Teach them how to edit their press release page so that it only shows titles, and dates, and a "short blurb" field. As they gain more understanding, you'll find they naturally gravitate towards more advanced concepts. Best of all, you don't have to waste time talking about boring things that they don't need to know, or blabbering about stuff that they already understand.

2) The student is always on the spot (meaning, paying attention)

Nearly everyone has a tendency to worry about asking "stupid questions" (they are never stupid questions). If a student actually has to do all tasks required to teach something themselves, they won't be able to hide the fact that they missed a critical concept. You'll know fairly quickly if you need to do a better job of explaining the admin menu and how it fits together, and the pattern it follows. You also will probably find out that they still have conceptual issues that need to be cleared up between the very similar taxonomy, block, and menu pages. You see, every little task becomes A TEST. Testing is about taking off the training wheels. Even when they *fail*, the very fact that their brain had to struggle before hand means they'll have learned something. Its uncommon for someone to fail tests like "go to the block admin page" more than 2 twice. Eventually, they'll know where to look even when they've never seen it, and you are just now introducing the concept. Just keep testing them. After all, its really a test of your teaching skills, no?

While this makes teaching and learning more challenging, they learn dramatically faster then the monologue projector methods, or constant email support alternatives. .

*There's no exceptions to anything I write, FYI. If there were a lot of variables, a situations where these rules didn't work, I'd cover them one by one. Because Drupal Planet readers love long winded tracts that refuse to take sides.