CodeRefinery teaching philosophies

Ice-breaker in groups (20 minutes)

• Share your approach to teaching and your teaching philosophy with your group.

• Please share your tricks and solutions in the live document for others.

Additional ice-breaker questions:

• What is your motivation for taking this training?

• How structured or informal are your own teaching needs?

• What difference do you notice between the teaching what we (also Carpentries) do and traditional academic teaching?

• What other skills need to be taught, but academic teaching isn’t the right setting?

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Here CodeRefinery instructors share their training philosophy to show that we all have different teaching styles and how these differences are beneficial to CodeRefinery workshops.

It is important to explain how much we value individuals and that there is not one way to teach but as many ways as individuals. We want to help each other to find the way that is best for each of us.

Video recordings

Recently we have recorded some of the below as videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpLblYHCzJAAHF89P-GCjEXWC8CF-7nhX

Anne Fouilloux

I regularly teach Carpentries workshops so I try to apply what I have learnt to CodeRefinery workshops. However, I know our target audience is very much different and that I need to adapt my teaching style. I am still trying to find what works best in which situations and this is why I like so much CodeRefinery workshops. We usually have a wider range of skills and very mixed backgrounds so we usually have to be more careful with the pace and time given for exercises.

Some considerations:

• I spend quite a lot of time reading the CodeRefinery material and practising myself exercises. I particularly like to read the instructor notes just before teaching: they usually highlight important aspects both for preparing and teaching.

• I usually do not show too much in advance the material as I think it prevents asking questions. If you have less competent practitioners in the classroom, they can easily copy-paste to avoid slowing down the entire classroom.

• Ideally, I’d like to give several exercises so anyone can work at its own pace. I find it is important that everybody gets something different from the workshop.

• I love breaks as it gives us an opportunity to discuss with attendees on their research topics. I am especially interested to understand what software they write and how they plan to use what they learn during our workshops.

Bjørn Lindi

My teaching style has changed a bit since I started with CodeRefinery. In the beginning I had this “BLOB” (Binary Large OBject) of knowledge and experience that I wanted to to convey to the participants. With experience and some help from the Carpentries Instructor training, I have realized I need to serialize the “BLOB”, to be able to share it with others.

In a similar fashion as you would do with a binary large object which you intend to send over the wire, you will need stop signals, check-sums and re-transmissions, when you give a lecture. I have come to appreciate the natural periods/breaks the lessons offers, the questions raised, the errors that appear during type-along and the re-transmission. Co-instructors are good to use for re-transmission or broadening a specific topic.

When I started with CodeRefinery my inclination was to give a lecture. Today I am trying to be a guide during a learning experience, a learning experience which includes me as well. That may sound a bit self-centric, but is in fact the opposite, as I have to be more sensitive to what is going on in the room. The more conscious I am of being a guide, the better lesson.

Tools that I find useful in preparing a lesson is concept maps and Learner Personas, though I have develop to few them.

• Concept Maps

• Learner Personas

Thor Wikfeldt

I never want to leave any learner behind and I really don’t like seeing confused, blank faces in the classroom. At the same time I sometimes worry about some participants getting bored if a lesson is progressing slowly. This is always a difficult compromise and something I struggle with!

I try to focus on making concepts intuitive, to “make sense” to the learners. Of course this is usually based on how I learned the topic myself and how it makes sense to me.

I try to establish connections between topics: “this thing here is similar to what we saw in the previous lesson where we learned about X…”.

Before mastering a lesson by teaching in many times I try to “follow the script”. After becoming very familiar with a lesson I start to improvise more and react more dynamically to questions, e.g. by taking a detour to explain a confusing topic more clearly.

What I think I do too often: copy-paste code/text from lesson material. This can leave learners behind - typing out the code and describing it is slower, but more learning takes place. More advanced learners will hopefully “be compensated” by interesting advanced exercises which follow.

Stefan Negru

A lesson is a conversation, it is useful if both the trainer and the trainee are engaged. For that reason I try to have, most of the time, a conversation with the classroom and after we finish parts of a lesson, step back and see how we might use what we learned.

That brings me to another point I follow throughout the lessons, answering questions like:

• How can we apply in practice what we just learned?

• Do you see yourself (the trainee) using that in practice, why or why not?

Most of the times those seem like open-ended questions to the trainees that just learned something new, so I try to find examples, most of the times from personal experience.

Last thing is that analogies are important when I teach, I try to find analogies in order to simplify a convoluted part of a lesson.

Radovan Bast

My teaching changed by 180 degrees after taking the Carpentries instructor training. Before that I used slides, 45 minute lecture blocks, and separate exercise sessions. After the Carpentries instructor training I embraced the interaction, exercises, demos, and typos.

My goal for a lesson is to spark curiosity to try things after the lesson, both for the novices (“This looks like a useful tool, I want to try using it after the workshop.”) and the more experienced participants (“Aha - I did not know you could do this. I wonder whether I can make it work with X.”). I like to start lessons with a question because this makes participants look up from their browsers.

Keeping both the novices and the experts engaged during a lesson can be difficult and offering additional exercises seems to be a good compromise.

For me it is a good sign if there are many questions. I like to encourage questions by asking questions to the participants. But I also try not to go into a rabbit hole when I get a question where only experts will appreciate the answer.

I try to avoid jargon and “war stories” from the professional developers’ perspective or the business world. Most researchers may not relate to them. For examples I always try to use the research context. Avoid “customer”, “production”, also a lot of Agile jargon is hard to relate to.

Less and clear is better than more and unclear. Simple examples are better than complicated examples. Almost never I have felt or got the feedback that something was too simple. I am repeating in my head to not use the words “simply”, “just”, “easy”. If participants take home one or two points from a lesson, that’s for me success.

I prepare for the lesson by reading the instructor guide and all issues and open pull requests. I might not be able to solve issues, but I don’t want to be surprised by known issues. I learn the material to a point where I know precisely what comes next and am never surprised by the next episode or slide. This allows me to skip and distill the essence and not read bullet point by bullet point.

I try to never deviate from the script and if I do, be very explicit about it.

A great exercise I can recommend is to watch a tutorial on a new programming language/tool you have never used. It can feel very overwhelming and fast to get all these new concepts and tools thrown at self. This can prepare me for how a participant might feel.

I find it very helpful if there is somebody else in the room who helps me detecting when I go too fast or become too confusing. I like when two instructors complement each other during a lesson but when doing that to others, I am often worried of interrupting their flow and timing too much.

A mistake I often do is to type too fast and in my mind I force myself to slow down.

Sabry Razick

My approach is to show it is fun to demystify concepts. Once a concept is not a mystery anymore, the learners will understand is what it means, where it is coming from, why it is in place and what it could it offer for their future. I try to relate concepts to real life with a twist of humour whenever possible if the outcome is certain not be offensive to any one. I use diagrams whenever possible, I have spent weeks creating diagrams that is sometime three or four sentences. That effort I consider worthwhile as my intention is not to teach, but to demystify. Once that is achieved, learners will learn the nitty gritty on their own easily and with confidence, when they have the use-case.

Juho Lehtonen

I’m gradually realising the different ways to get a hint whether the workshop participants are still following or perhaps bored. I assume it’s communicating with the class, with exercises and simply by asking now and then. I also try to remember to observe how people look like (puzzled, bored) while I teach, not so obvious for me.

I believe that learners communicating with each other, in addition to with instructors and helpers, really helps them to understand things faster. (At least it helps me). So I try to make sure that no one sits or works alone at the workshops.

Richard Darst

Like many people, I’ve often been teaching, but rarely a teacher. I tend to teach like I am doing an informal mentorship. I’ve realized long ago that my most important lessons weren’t learned in classes, but by a combination of seeing things done by friends and independent study after that. I’ve realized that teaching (the things I teach) is trying to correct these differences in backgrounds.

My main job is supporting computing infrastructure, so my teaching is very grounded in real-world problems. I’m often start at the very basics, because this is what I see missing most often.

When teaching, I like lots of audience questions and don’t mind going off-script a bit (even though I know it should be minimized). I find that sufficient audience interest allows any lesson to be a success - you don’t have to know everything perfectly, just show how you’d approach a problem.

João M. da Silva

I started giving technical trainings twenty years ago, and hence my perspective is perhaps more inclined towards the development of hands-on abilities and capability to solve problems, independently or in a team.

But the development of hands-on practical skills, requires some essential knowledge about the domain and some willingness to try different approaches in case one gets stuck. Some call this the “KSA approach” (“Knowledge-Skills-Attitude). Hence, I try to impart the essential knowledge (and where to find out more) at my trainings. And to encourage and challenge students in order to make them overcome their self-perceived limits (e.g. “I’m a Humanist, I can’t use Python virtualenv”).

I’ve been trying to study more about the Cognitive aspects of learning over the years, and I should find out the time to return to that. There’s very interesting research in Problem Solving, with Learning being a important component in that domain.

Storytelling: humans are neurologically made for paying attention to good stories, and that’s something that I try to put into account: to give a lesson like it would be a relevant narrative for the students, one that they could relate to and help them in their work

I like to draw and be creative with that, but have to pay attention to my handwriting during my trainings. I reckon that Architectural diagrams help students to understand the big picture, so I should invest more on those when development training material. I would also like to start looking into Concept Maps and Semantic Trees in training.