Welcome and introduction

What do we want to get out of this workshop

  • Introduction of instructors and helpers

  • Each instructor can say what we want to get out of the instructor training

  • But we want to know from everybody and collect these in the live notes

Goals for this workshop

Goals for this instructor training

  • Inspire teachers and staff who have to teach indirectly as part of their job: use best practices for the modern world, especially for online teaching.

  • Promote collaboration in teaching: less going alone.

  • Promote CodeRefinery sustainability: form a network that can work together to share the work and benefits.

Giving confidence

Goal number one should be that we give participants the confidence to independently apply the tools or knowledge learnt. This is more important that giving a “complete” overview. [Lucy Whalley gave this great comment at one of our workshops]

  • You don’t have to know everything to use (or teach) something.

  • For the large majority of topics we teach, there are many resources online which provide how-to guides or tutorials. And the Stack Overflow answer bank isn’t getting any smaller. So we need to ask why do people attend in-person sessions if there is information freely available? Our impression is that it is for confidence building, identity formation, perhaps signposting to resources.

  • This also links with building a welcoming/inclusive environment: for example, imposter syndrome, which disproportionately affects under-represented groups (link), can manifest as low self-confidence –> building the confidence of students in the classroom may lead to a more diverse community.

Tools for this workshop

We often start workshops with these:

Code of Conduct

  • We follow The CodeRefinery Code of Conduct.

  • This is a hands-on, interactive workshop.

    • Be kind to each other and help each other as best you can.

    • If you can’t help someone or there is some problem, let someone know.

    • If you notice something that prevents you from learning as well as you can, let us know and don’t suffer silently.

  • It’s also about the little things:

    • volume

    • font size

    • generally confusing instructor

    • not enough breaks