When aiming at maximum personal impact, the smaller the cohort, the better

After our first in-person experiences, I was certain of a few things:

The highest time and care spent in close interactions with the students, the better it was for their learning.

Time learning alone or processing the learnings was super important too, but that in a way free and not our responsibility. We advised and incentivised students to invest their time well. But what we really had to plan and manage was the time we interacted with them ourselves or via our mentors and guest lecturers.

The ability to work on real projects and get feedback from company stakeholders far exceeded the learning value of mock projects.

While the students didn’t have enough confidence on their skills, it made sense to keep their training wheels and stick to internal projects for them to train with. But as soon as they had a fair sense of the work, nothing would beat the depth and reach of the lessons they stumbled upon in real projects.

As I described in the full story, there’s many other aspects that worked well in TNDS1 and 2, like having several guests over for multiple points of view, working in person in a studio-like environment to increase idea exchange, or even taking road-trips to visit companies, workshops with outsiders and many others.

However, my goal in 2019 was to reduce my overheads to a minimum, while still having as much impact in learning experiences as possible. Instead of messing around too much with the things I knew worked, I went to the safe side of it and decided to decrease the maximum number of seats in a cohort.

I knew from past teaching experience that smaller groups worked best most of times because it allowed me to fully engage and share my focus with each individual when needed. And who doesn’t like to feel the center of someone else’s attention?

How it was for me

This time I would be the only facilitator. So by setting a maximum of 5 people on each cohort, I knew I would manage to handle all interactions, both during and after class. I was teaching 2 classes per week of 2 hours each, plus 1 hour of mentoring to 3 students each Saturday.

Personally it still felt a bit too much for me to handle while working a full-time job, but on a good day, that amount of interactions was enough to keep top-of-mind where each student was who need help with what.

So I would say it was a bit exhausting at times to teach TNDS3, but much less to 4, and 5 being the smoothest class. I learned what needed to be done to keep things running on time and to keep students happy and motivated.

How it went for students

I’d say students from TNDS3-5 really got their money’s worth and what was promised to them, which was a very personal and up-close experience with lot’s of guidance.

I learned a while ago that each student has their own helpers and blockers in their career. If you try to teach everyone the same thing with the same method you will only get so far. At some point you really have to take individual time and spend time with people who might not have understood things so deeply.

This iteration of TNDS still worked best when individuals also had enough time to invest on their own, solidifying their learning. For some people this was hard to reconcile with personal and professional life. But I think knowing they had a mentor waiting for them on Saturday morning and on slack helped getting back on track numerous times.