40. INVISIBLE TEACHER *
Usually, the teacher is the central point of a seminar. You lecture your manuscript. The participants are passive, copy the contents, do not ask questions; they do not try to follow you in your thinking. Learning is most effective if the learners works on their own. Otherwise, the participants start to feel bored, motivation is low and the participants start to do other things. In the worst case, they leave the sessions and get coffee.
Therefore, put the participants into the center of the seminar. Your job as a teacher is to help the participants learn for themselves. The best teaching method is not to teach at all, but to let the participants work on the content on their own. You should offer the participants help whenever they have problems. Sometimes teacher presentations are necessary, but you should keep the "show" part of your sessions to a minimum. Use different WORK FORMS to achieve this.
It is also important that you do not show off with your skill. The participants do not attend a seminar to learn how skilled their teacher is, but to learn as much of the content as possible (with as few work and as much fun as possible). This "show off" problem is especially critical with very skilled teachers, or gurus. A guru in a certain domain is not necessarily the best teacher, there is more to good teaching than good domain knowledge.
This pattern has consequences on how sessions are organized (see WORK FORMS). The active part of a teacher should be minimized by utilizing group work, exercises, discussions, et cetera.