Wow. Asking that instead of “do you have any questions” is so powerful.
You sound like a teacher who genuinely cares, thank you.
I wish I could hug you.
There must be a zillion useful "language hacks", if we only knew.
I learned "All negatives can be stated a positive" in the early 90s. Been trying to use it ever since.
For example, instead of "Don't run!", maybe say "Please walk." Completely changed my relationship to my kid.
One helpful bit in that particular "life skills" seminar was the practice and role playing.
I would never know to use your "Does anyone have any questions?" technique unless someone showed me.
And I still struggle to imagine how to apply these kind of life lessons in my every day.
It'd be fun, helpful to having a recording of all my interactions, and have professionals review the tape with me. I took some public speaking training where we actually did this. Illuminating.
FWIW, one of the best programmers I know strongly advocates acting lessons.
Had the same experience when I figured out to make offerings as A/B choices (and non-choices).
Instead of "Do you want broccoli?" It's: "Would you rather broccoli or cauliflower?"
Or the non-choice: "Do you want to eat your broccoli at the kitchen table or on the porch?"
Step 2: Pick a curriculum to follow. Many other bootcamps have their curriculum online. I have my own that I built over the past 10 years of teaching and making sure every single student I taught got a job. You can use it too if you want: c0d3.com/book
Step 3: Pick a time. I picked 8am - 12pm to make it hard on students. Students who are willing to get up and show up at 8am are the students who is really committed. Around 10am I go off to my full time job, my students take over.
Step 4: (Best Practice) DO NOT put your students into cohorts. I made that mistake before and I had to spend months fixing it. Students have a tendency to compare themselves with others so they will start memorizing and pretend to understand to keep up. From day one, tell them that everybody will learn at a different pace and take as much time as they need to understand the material. Take time to be creative with what they learned and explore. You award their creativity (when they twist your teaching to do something strange) with your complete attention and they will keep pushing the limits of what they learn.
After students learn, you get free engineers to make your ideas come true! For my students, I simply have them build apps (open-sourced) that I wished existed and have them work together to build them.
I help them write their resume as they build features so the features count as work experience. My students list me as professional reference.
This is what I do, before work and after work.
If you need an example, here's our meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3/
Here's the core product our students built: https://c0d3.com/
Here's an example of a recent product launch: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Learnings-from-our-open-s...
The greatest gift I get back from doing this, is while I'm sleeping or busy at my full time job, I have 3-5 student engineers thinking about my side projects and building them.
One simple strategy is to close any bit of teaching you do with the phrase, "What questions do you have?" This is a subtle but important change from "Does anyone have any questions?" The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions.
When people do ask questions, you can ask how many other people had the same question. If you have more than just a handful of students, it's quite likely that if one person asks a question then others will have the same question. This normalizes the mindset of having questions, and not understanding everything as soon as it's presented.
It sounds like you are probably modeling a good atmosphere for asking questions. I think it's important to understand that you can't make everyone immediately comfortable asking questions. If people have been ignored or made to feel stupid when they've asked questions, it will take a while for them to trust you and the overall environment enough to start asking their own questions.
I taught high school math and science for 25 years, and always heavily emphasized that all questions are welcome. It took new students a while to understand that this was sincere; many of them had been told long ago to stop asking so many questions, or been publicly embarrassed for asking questions. Same goes for making mistakes; it's beyond infuriating that some teachers still intentionally embarrass students for not knowing things, or not getting things right on the teacher's schedule. Those practices are intellectually traumatizing to many people.