Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, May 3, 2021
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, de Mello, Dwyer, Kindred (guest), Koseva, Russell, Thomas
Agenda
- Discuss potential upcoming workshops, including ideas for Data Carpentry Geospatial
- Debrief/discussion about Carpentries Instructor Training
- Volunteer to share a tip that helped you while helping or instructing at a past workshop
Discussions
Potential Upcoming Workshops, mostly Data Carpentry Geospatial
A lot of this discussion centered on making sure that learners who register for this workshop have enough R skills to succeed in the workshop. Ideas for addressing this problem included:
- Offer an introductory R workshop a few weeks before DC-Geospatial and announce both workshops at the same time
- Questions for this approach include tracking registration across both workshops, enough instructors and helpers to staff both workshops
- Learners often either over- or under-estimate their skill level, so relying on learners to decide whether or not they need the introductory workshop may be hit-and-miss
- The introductory R lesson included with DC-Geospatial is not the only R lesson that would be a good introduction. Any lesson that includes ggplot would work
- Declare that DC-Geospatial is not introductory for R and include information about R skills that will be assumed during the workshop
- Encourage novice R learners to register for DC-Geospatial and encourage them to work through a Carpentries introductory R lesson on their own; schedule office hours for these learners to get their questions answered
There was consensus that the group needed to pick a direction and move forward. All the approaches are valid and there’s not a wrong way to do it.
The audience of DC-Geospatial will determine what is taught. Some learners will need the Geospatial Concepts material; for others, the big payoff will be the raster time series material.
A list of minimum core competencies for participating in DC-Geospatial was created during the meeting:
- Reading csvs and other files into R as objects
- Navigating the environment, installing packages and libraries
- Tidyverse; gathering, sub-setting, editing and otherwise manipulating data frames
- General troubleshooting
- Piping
- Familiarity with printing data/summarizing data (head, str, tail etc) would be nice
- Some familiarity with plotting using ggplot
Instructor Training Check-in and Debrief
Folks who have recently completed instructor training discussed their experiences and what to expect. It’s important to be able to use the concepts learned during instructor training in an instructor group and by putting on workshops.
Share a helpful tip
In lieu of a specific professional development topic, attendees shared a tip that has been helpful for them in the past:
- You’re doing better than you think you are :-)
- Have someone watch the chat while you are teaching
- If possible, have a notetaker for the Etherpad, especially for online workshops
- It’s okay to ask learners to make their font or screen bigger
- As an instructor, don’t be afraid to repeat things even if you’re not asked to; someone probably got lost on the first step and needs the review
- Teaching a new lesson means not knowing where people are going to get hung up, so going extra slow
- Tell the story that explains why someone would do what is in the lesson in their daily workflow – helps connect the dots between their work and the lesson
- You’re not going to get as far through the lesson as you think
Notes by JBK