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Instructors

Running a Successful Technical Workshop

There are many ways to lead a successful technical workshop, but following certain practices can make your teaching go more smoothly. I'm listing some of the most important items from our experience with Foundations below, but you can also find others on the Carpentries Handbook: Tips for Instructors page.

  • Prepare for your workshop by making the curriculum your own. Often, developing a set of notes, a slide deck, or your own version of the curriculum will force you to become deeply familiar with the material and can be useful resources for other instructors. You should run all the code in the lesson you'll present on your own laptop during your preparation—you'll often discover issues you didn't know about. It's a lot easier to fix a small problem on your machine before the workshop than it is under pressure while at the front of the room.
  • Include significant time in your lesson (15-30% of the overall lesson time is recommended) for students to work independently on exercises or challenges. A balance of listening time and independent time helps students solidify their understanding, and often students will need a few minutes to catch up with the lesson or to ask a helper with a problem that's been holding them back. During independent time, you can move around the room and get a sense of whether the lesson is moving too fast or slow and whether there are certain pain points that you should address while speaking—identifying these issues is almost impossible from the front of the room.
  • Use live coding as your primary vehicle for teaching. While written materials or a slide deck can be useful supplements, our feedback shows that people consistently get more out of workshops that use live coding extensively. Live coding can be stressful initially, but students take away much more when they can see exactly what they should be doing at the front of the room.. One thing to avoid is to give a notebook or code to your students and have them step through it—students tend not to feel that this is hands-on instruction. It's fine to provide a notebook or code to students in case they fall behind or so they can reference it after the workshop, but expect students to write and run their own code during the lesson.
  • Give a lot of context. When starting the lesson, make sure to introduce yourself, you might even want to say a few words about your background. As you start the lesson, give context on the tool—what is it, and how is it used in research? It's important that students buy in to a tool right from the beginning, and for tools such as Git that have uses that are less immediately obvious to students, this can be critical.
  • If possible, arrange students in tables or some other collaborative group arrangement. Encourage them to help one another with issues that come up, and that they shouldn't be afraid to ask one another for help or to ask if another student could use assistance. You might consider having the students practice asking a question of their neighbor or asking their neighbor if they need help to model the practice and break the ice.
  • End on time, not earlier or later. We do tend to receive negative feedback when the ending time for sessions is longer or shorter than indicated on the schedule. You're free to edit the schedule—it's your workshop—but if at all possible stick to the time listed. If you're running through the material fast, that likely means you should include some independent working time throughout your lesson. Don't include the working time at the end, as students will generally depart if they know there isn't more instruction coming. If you're running behind, pick another logical stopping point earlier than you planned and end there rather than rushing through the last material or going long.
  • Don't forget those breaks. Breaking on time builds trust with your students and, frankly, it's more humane. It's hard to listen and learn for long stretches, and breaks are an important part of respecting how hard it can be to learn this material. Make sure to take the break yourself—as the instructor, you might not want to spend the whole break helping students if it means you'll have less energy during the rest of the lesson.
  • Keep up the energy. Especially in the last session of the last day, students can be dragging a bit. It helps a great deal if you come in strong and keep up the energy throughout the lesson. Drink that extra coffee if you have to, but put on a smile, speak loudly (or use a microphone if one is available), and engage students with your presence. Standing up and moving around can help with this—you don't need to be standing the whole time, but it's frequently better if you can.