We had the wrap-up meetings for Round 7 of instructor training yesterday. A few people weren’t able to make it—we hope to catch up with them soon—but those who could attend gave us some good feedback. The full summary is below, but what I learned was:
- I need to include a lesson early in the course on the structure of the materials in our repository, and how to configure things for a workshop. I’ll try to do this on Thursday, February 20, in the usual time slots (10:00, 14:00, and 19:00 Eastern) for people from recent and current training groups.
- People want a chance to watch more experienced teachers in action. One possibility would be to set up something like SmarterCookie or Edthena, two sites that let teachers upload videos of themselves in action so that other people can comment on what they do and how they do it. I’ll think about ways and means, and see what we can set up in the next couple of weeks.
My thanks once again to everyone who stayed with us through what turned out to be a longer-than-usual run of the course—I look forward to teaching with you all some day soon.
19:00 EST
- Greg Wilson (Mozilla, Toronto)
- The most useful thing I learned in this class was…
- The most surprising thing I learned was…
- The most disappointing thing about this class was…
- The best way to improve this class would be…
- Daniel Hocking (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA)
- The timing of lessons (how to have a short topic section then have time for individual/group activity)
- How small things like the IDE or screen could be distracting to the extent that it would greatly disrupt a short lesson unless introduced at the start.
- Not doing a longer lesson (even if it was a series of 2-5 minute subtopics)
- More interaction with the existing course material and how to actually do a bootcamp
- Joshua Adelman (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA)
- How to pare down and focus a short lesson containing a single idea.
- I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult installing/navigating software was in terms of teaching beginners. My threshold is definitely higher for the frustration level, and I wasn’t fully putting myself in beginner’s shoes — I’m not as easily deterred by rough edges.
- I felt like the timing of the course was such that I didn’t give it the full focus that I wanted to (e.g. missed an assignment).
- More opportunities for live teaching. The 3 minute exercises were great, but I’d like a better proxy for a full scale bootcamp.
- Fan Yang (Iowa State University, Ames, IA)
- the structure of teaching, how to communicating ideas with students, how to self conciously improve teaching skills
- how useful the concept graph is
- I guess it would be that I was expecting on doing a 30min online tutorial like the previous group. but we didn’t. I was kind of stressed out about it but the same time I felt like I missed a great opportunaty.
- more interactions with fellow swc trainees?+1 more back and forth feedbacks
- Bill Mills (TRIUMF, Vancouver)
- The most useful thing was definitely the structure in the textbook; parsing those ideas in really concrete ways helped structure teaching strategy.
- How involved it is to make sure material is pitched at the right level, particularly for beginners (I may have had a tendency to overkill intro students in the past…)
- How difficult it is to provide more practical teaching experience and feedback.
- More exercises developing teaching material, perhaps.
- John Corless (Dallas, TX)
- How important peer-to-peer learning is
- Just how hard it is to teach well (e.g. correct level of material for audience, how best to communicate it without too much distraction, etc.)
- I guess I hoped I would feel more “ready”
- I would really like to see a short summary of all the really neat concepts about what impacts effective education (basically the “nuggets” of info Greg unveiled each week)
- Ryan Williams (Iowa State University, Ames, IA)
- The most useful thing I learned in this class was how to design short lessons to fit in a 3 minute window.
- The most surprising thing I learned was ideas that I feel I have a good grasp on are difficult to communicate in a concise manner or in a way that is easy for others to understand.
- The most disappointing (or, if you’re English, “least satisfactory”) thing was that we didn’t meet more often. I think a few more meetings would be helpful regarding the nuts and bolts of running a software carpentry workshop.
- The best way to improve this class would be a few extra lessons maybe on specific topics or on how to design software carpentry lessons for workshops.
- Rémi Emonet (University of Saint Étienne, France)
- The existence of the book might be the most useful thing that I learned: we really need such summaries of the established and active research in pedagogy.
- I am actually positively surprised by the number of people that register to this teaching software carprentry.
- I was a little disappointed by the 3-minute teaching thing. Instructions were not so clear I think.
- I think the rhythm of the overall swc teaching can be improved. There have been rush periods and slow moments (but I have been variably busy too, so maybe it’s just a perception). + Maybe talking more about the workshops also?
- Pauline Barmby (Western U, The Other London, ON)
- most useful: a reminder of the importance of short-term memory in teaching. Also agreed that book was very good; I now have my sci pedagogy group reading it.
- most surprising: (that I had forgotten the above)
- most disappointing: I guess I was hoping for more hands on experience with using the SWC materials
- best way to improve: more practice teaching is always good!
- Dave Jones (State College, PA)
- Practicing stuff over and over makes it easier
- The number of details that make for effective teaching was surprising at first, but it shouldn’t have been
- I think the class was useful, but still think for me, I need more ‘practical’ experience (that is more of a mirror of how i feel though.)
- More info about the SWC materials (probably overview, because different people have more expertise at different areas)
- Robert Flight (Lexington, KY)
- the way different people learn, and expert blocks to teaching novices
- that the class was not about learning particular content to teach
- That there wasn’t more practice with others and getting specific feedback about teaching style and roadblocks
- Opportunities to watch expert teachers and learn what they are doing right, and watching bad teaching and evaluate what they are doing wrong
- Naupaka Zimmerman (Tucson, AZ)
- How to do a screencast or teach from a terminal live (how important it is to know where you’re going and what you need to get there and that everything takes way more time to explain simply than you think it will)
- How difficult it is to remember what it was like before you understood something, e.g. grokking the command-line mentality vs a graphical one
- I think I was expecting a bigger end project, like git+screencast+teaching with 4 people or something. A grand-challenge, if you will.
- Examples of master teachers doing their thing (besides you Greg), especially some live coding/terminal-ing sessions. Maybe a live screencast of a past SWC session, with voiceover commentary by Greg, and ability to pause and ask questions about what happened and when and why. Mystery Science Theater 3000 style.
10:00 EST
- Greg Wilson (Mozilla, Toronto)
- The most useful thing I learned in this class was…
- The most surprising thing I learned was…
- The most disappointing (or, if you’re English, “least satisfactory”) thing was…
- The best way to improve this class would be…
- Denis Haine (Montreal, QC)
- a plan or structure to approach learning and transmit knowledge
- most surprising: the different “tricks” (special considerations) to reach specific people; and often what you think (before the course) is not appropriate to reach these people
- technology is still disappointing some time…
- improvement: a guidance on using the swcarpentry git repo, where to put things etc.
- Trevor Bekolay (UWaterloo, ON)
- I think the book (knowing that it exists, I suppose) was the most useful, as it’s collected together a lot of useful research that I didn’t know existed.
- How much you can get across in 3 mintues. Keeping the presentations to that length highlighted it.
- How little we really know about how to teach well. And by ‘we’ I mean humanity.
- Or, perhaps more accurately, how that hasn’t percolated down to the general populace (including most university professors)
- Perhaps redoing one of the exercises (especially the screencast) would allow people to incorporate what they learned from seeing other people present.
- David Rio Deiros (Purdue, West Lafayette, Indiana)
- Working/solving problems within the users’ domain keeps users motivated? Also, solving the problems in realtime seems to be more effective.
- There is great research available on how to effectively teach (book is stellar).
- How much hard work you have to put to prepare the classes, even when they are only 3 min.(good news: you can reuse)
- Having real teaching workshops, perhaps online (Yes, technology is not there yet), while the class is going. Also, using more the book! I think it is amazing and has great material.
- David Worth (STFC, Software Engineering Support Centre, UK)
- That teaching/learning is more than just instructor telling pupil what to do
- That there’s a book about research in to the topic of learning. That I could do a 3 minute video that was well received
- Not being able to do the 3 minute lesson last time
- More details on the structure of the git repo for teaching material and where we were to add our stuff
- Scott Chamberlain (Durham, NC)
- The fact that people can only hold certain number of things in RAM — so teach accordingly
- Motivation is extremely important, hadn’t thought about it before
- agreed with Denis, the technology isn’t always working
- Maybe a bit more feedback on teaching
- Luis Pedro Coelho (EMBL, Germany)
- The use of templates to teach programming, the screencasting technologies
- How much there is out there on learning that is evidence-based
- That these meetings were often tripped up by technological issues.
- More advance knowledge of what is coming up as some weeks sometimes.