Presentation hints

This is assorted hints about actually presenting.

Starting off

  • Don’t start off with tech details, say why this is important. Think of what the emotional (“coolness”) appeal is and start off with that.

  • Why will this be useful?

During the lessons

  • Take advantage of the mistakes/typos you make when teaching! When you do a mistake and get an error message and realize what you did wrong, explain what happened since this can offer valuable insights to learners.

  • Ask “do you do X?” where X is what you are teaching. Instead, ask “how do you do Y?”. The first question implies something you are doing wrong, the second is open-ended.

Exercise sessions

  • What to do during exercise sessions

  • Always go over the lesson with someone else the day before.

Try to stick to the material

  • Don’t try to show everything, show less, but show it clearly.

  • Try not to completely deviate from the material. Ideally, rather influence the material before you teach. Of course it is good to react to questions and to adapt the material to the audience, so sometimes an excursion can be very useful, but make clear that you then deviate from the script and be explicit about whether participants should follow what you do or only watch.

  • If you want to show some extra steps in the terminal, show them perhaps at the end of an exercise block to not “mess up” the exercise half-way and change it with respect to the material.

  • It is good to mention an anecdote or two but be careful about mentioning too much new jargon which only very few participants may relate to.

Main vs exercises sessions

As an instructor, when preparing your lesson you first need to decide how to balance between the main room and breakout sessions.

  • Clearly say when a learner watches, when they type along, when they should work on something independently as an exercise.

  • CodeRefinery is traditionally a hands-on workshop, so exercise sessions should be a large part of the workshop. Usually, it’s good to try to minimize talking and let people get to the exercise sessions as soon as possible. The written material should support this.

  • We usually keep the main room mostly for general discussions. Small exercises or polls can also be done in the main room, for all hands-on exercises we divide the learners into breakout-rooms each with one team leader.

  • To give you an idea about how the work in the exercise sessions is going, monitor the Notes closely and if time allows try to visit a few breakout rooms to see how it is going and if needed adjust the timing.

Preparing for the exercises

As an instructor, you need to clearly define what the tasks of each exercise session is (even if it is just “explore and discuss”). Online courses need more “meta talk” about how you expect things to go, since it’s not as easy to read the room or fill in expectations later (distractions, hard to communicate to breakout rooms after opened).

  • Clearly say what the tasks of the breakout session will be.

  • Put that task and a link to the part of the lesson in the Notes.

  • Clearly say how long each breakout session will be (make sure it’s long enough and adjust during the exercise session if needed).

  • Clearly say if things in the future will depend on this exercise (is someone completely lost if they don’t make it to the end. Halfway?)

  • Try to make breakout sessions longer:

    • imagine a 5 minute overhead for each session, getting people there, deciding who does what, acquainted with what they need to do, and debugging problems.

    • 10 minutes is quite short (5 min figuring out what to do + 5 min doing), so 20 minutes is best.

    • Can you say less and let people discover it for themselves?

As a helper or team leader, if anything is unclear to you, it is very unclear to others. Comment/ask in the Notes or speak up and ask!

Wrap up

  • Say what you taught and why.

  • Say what comes next. Say where to get that.

  • Update the instructor’s guide and file issues for any problems you noticed.

  • Get instant feedback from your co-teachers and helpers (students too, if they offer any).

    • Consider making notes on a 4-way diagram of (content←→presentation) × (went well←→can be improved).