A colleague of mine had the opportunity to give a short (15 minute) informal block of instruction to a friend of hers. Most firearms instruction in the US is informally done between friends or relatives.
Their session didn’t involve any live fire and was conducted in their office. It was simply a short briefing on basic safety rules, gun handling, and model specific instructions on how to operate her handgun.
An interesting comment came up in our discussion about the session. It’s worth keeping in mind any time we teach somebody something, whether the subject is firearms related or not.
I talked with her not at her.
When we teach an adult, it’s always worth remembering to approach it that way. Even if we are a Subject Matter Authority, the person is one of our peers and deserves to be treated respectfully. They should be treated like a client in an Adult-Adult relationship, not a grade school student in a Parent-Child relationship.
Mutual respect will garner the rapport necessary for the instruction to be effective and add value to the person’s life.
tacticalprofessor 
Really qualified Instructor’s should keep in mind the average IQ is 100. So, in order to establish a peer-to-peer discussion, the conversation might begin with an inquiry – “Are you are regular idiot or a complete phucking idiot?”
Dear Tactical Professor,
Once again, you tell us what we needed to be told. Many thanks!
As a fellow professor (biology and chemistry) of 35+ years teaching experience (plus countless formal and informal hours of teaching about firearms and emergency medical care and nursing), I underscore and cast your words in boldface font. One can what you write of even if you simply go from teaching average entering college students to older, life-tempered community college students.
Unless you speak like a peer -and that neans listening like a peer- you’ll quickly lose whatever traction you had on your discussion partner’s attention and respect. As you should! Like a good physician, you need to listen and ask questions to know what is needed of you; you’ll find time to slip in that added safety message, or pet point about the front sight. You might even learn in return, such as about how to explain something in a better way.
All kidding aside (referring to the other post), while I think we do ourselves the mis-service of providing a moderate to poor job of training our minds in our current public education, average human intelligence is high intelligence, indeed. Treat it as such, and you’ll be surprised by the results.
Very nice Claude. Thank you!