Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, December 2, 2024
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Brooks-Kieffer, Busch, Conway, Friedl, Kisielinski, Koseva, Sanderson, Wilhelm
Agenda
- 2025 Meeting Schedule
- Workshop planning
- Other topics
Discussions
2025 Meeting Schedule
The group opted to keep the same meeting schedule into the new year. Jamene will send new appointments.
Workshop planning
January 2025: Genomics
Caroline and Boryana are instructing; in-person in Watson Library; two days only. Jamene will reserve the room and start planning tasks and registration.
February 2025: Intro R
Brian and Jess as instructors, possibly with Michelle. Brian will start an email thread for dates, division of instruction, etc. Considering SWC R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis as the placeholder lesson for now. Registration doesn’t need to open until January.
Time Series Data developing lesson
Possibly a trial run in January; the instructor group can help support this if needed. The second round of lesson development workshops hasn’t been announced yet.
Other topics
April talked about an instructor training community call. Taylor is looking at instructor training in February 2025. Many folks on the call had advice for the teaching demo:
- Don’t try to do too much. Explain everything you’re doing. The 5 minutes goes by fast.
- Everyone is friendly and most are doing a teaching demo for the first time.
- Practice the demo during instructor training, and then do the same thing for the actual teaching demo.
- Even people with teaching experience get a lot out of the training. Typically no teaching training in grad school and the teaching practiced by The Carpentries is very active and hands-on - different from lecture.
- Talking and typing takes practice but there’s no pressure to not make typos. Learners appreciate that it’s okay to make typos. It’s a good way to demonstrate troubleshooting. Narrate what typo you made and how you fix it.
- Teaching troubleshooting when something goes wrong is a really important skill for learners to see because they’ll have to do it themselves outside of the workshop.
Notes by JBK, posted by JBK