Hi W2KMAN --
While I'm no expert, here's what's worked for me in the past. (Before I get started, I should mention that I haven't taught too many computer classes -- just training classes at work -- but I've taught courses in research and statistics at the college level for six years.)
1) Be organized, organized, organized! It's a royal pain in the butt for students to try to learn and retain information if it's presented in a haphazard fashion. As an instructor, it's (to some extent) your responsibility not only to provide the information, but to provide a framework for learning that information. This brings me to...
2) Provide an outline for each class. The outline is useful both for you and for your students. It helps your students by providing some structure for learning the material. It helps you by making sure you don't leave out anything important. I spend the first few minutes providing a super-condensed summary of what we covered the previous class, then go over the outline for that class session. I use this time as an opportunity to show how different items/concepts are related and I can give them a sense of how the class flows.
3) Show your students that you respect them and care whether or not they learn. (Catch: you must actually respect them and care whether or not they learn.) You can do this by being patient with them while they learn, by taking the time to talk with them about how things are going in the class, finding out whether there's anything that's unclear to them, and soliciting (and responding to) lots of feedback. When I start each course, I hand out an information sheet that I use to find out more about my students. A couple of things that are the most important for me are: why they're taking the course, what they expect to get out of the course, and something unique or unusual about them (helps me remember names). I also hand out a anonymous course evaluations throughout the course (not just at the end) so I can fine-tune; every group is different. I also find that an anonymous feedback page on the course web site is effective at soliciting useful information. Surprisingly, I've not yet had anyone abuse this by just sending me nasty comments.
4) Make sure you're prepared. If I'm teaching a course for the first time, I generally expect to spend about 3-5 hours of prep time outside of the classroom for every hour I spend in the classroom. It doesn't matter if I know the course material backwards and forward or if it's completely new to me. That time is spent in syllabus construction, lecture prep, designing activities and homework, and finding other corroborative sources that can be used for supplements to what I say in class.
5) Use examples and analogies liberally. Cognitive psychologists have long told us that people learn most easily by relating new information to something that's already famililar to them. Take advantage of this and have at least a couple of analogies for every major point that you make. (For instance, when talking about the file allocation table, the "table of contents" analogy tends to work pretty well. When I have to explain disk defragmentation, I ask people to imagine that their favorite book's binding has torn and the pages have been put back all out of order. I talk about defragging as putting those pages back in order so they can be accessed more quickly and easily.) This is the place where knowledge of the material really pays off, since the better you know the subject, the better you'll be able to draw analogies to other topics. (For those who were following the brief liberal arts and IT thread, here's where that broad-based education *really* comes in handy!)
6) Have fun! If you're not enjoying teaching, there's no way that anybody in the room is going to enjoy learning from you. I try to run a fairly "flat" classroom, where I don't hold my authority position over the heads of my students (I ask to be called by my first name, and I tend to get upset when they call me "professor"
. I don't try to come across as their best pal, but I do have a sense of humor and try not to take myself too seriously.
Well, there's lots more, but that's a start. Make no mistake: teaching well is very hard work. It's also among the most rewarding things you'll ever find yourself doing. There's nothing that compares to the feeling you get when a student "clicks" with something that previously seemed completely alien to them.
Sorry for the length, and I hope that helps,
Don
