Key Points

What Makes a Good Teacher?

As an instructor, you are responsible for creating a safe and engaging learning environment for course participants
There are many different types of great instructor, but some features are shared
The coming weeks will teach you foundational teaching skills, while giving you space to practice and find your own educational voice.

A growth mindset helps provide an effective educational environment for you and your learners.
When giving feedback, we should be Actionable, Specific, and Kind
Feeling and managing discomfort is a common part of receiving feedback. Managing discomfort will help you accept feedback and grow from it.

We recommend an iterative lesson design process that begins with identifying the target audience, before defining learning outcomes, then creating assessments, writing explanatory content, and evaluating the lesson in a workshop.
Thinking about the target audience early in the design process helps to ensure that your lesson is built around the needs and motivations of real people.
Use the description of your target audience to help attract people with the appropriate interests and prior knowledge to your lesson.

Our goal when teaching novices is to help them construct useful mental models.
Exploring our own mental models can help us prepare to convey them.
Constructing a useful mental model requires practice and corrective feedback.
Formative assessments provide practice for learners and feedback to learners and instructors.

We will learn to develop lessons based on the (slightly adapted) Nicholls’ backward lesson design process.
There can be many reasons to create a new lesson.
This training will give you a process to follow to ensure your lesson is effective.

Defining objectives for a lesson can help to focus your content on the most important outcomes, and outline the scope of the project.
Following the SMART framework can help make your learning objectives as useful as possible.
Leaving objectives unrealistic or undefined increases the risk of a lesson losing focus or spending time on activities that do not help learners gain the most important skills.

Assessments are a way to determine whether the objectives you defined for the lesson have been reached.
Exercises are important for learners to move what they’ve learned to long-term memory.
Some types of exercises are better for particular audiences and to address certain objectives.

Spending time on preparing your teaching and feedback collection will make you and your participants get the most out of your workshop pilot.
Creating clear setup instructions as part of your lesson and circulating them ahead of the pilot is time well-invested and will give you more time when teaching the lesson.
Most Carpentries-style trainings will focus on Live Coding for content, but slides, whiteboards, and other content types are also helpful additions.

It is crucial to have an awareness of your physical surroundings and what you need in order to teach comfortably.
Consider the space, your physical self, and the way you are embodied in the room.
Also consider your participants and their comfort. Look for opportunities to increase accessibility.

Live coding forces the instructor to slow down.
Coding-along gives learners continuous practice and feedback.
Mistakes made during participatory live coding are valuable learning opportunities.

Your skill and comfort with running formative assessments will grow over time.
It is always beneficial to reflect on your own perception of your performance after teaching.
Asking course participants for feedback can help you improve your teaching process.
In the future, you should consider a formal pre-post survey framework to help you evaluate your curriculum.

It has been a pleasure spending time with you over these past two weeks.
We hope that this course has provided you with concrete skills, as well as confidence, that will help you on your teaching journey.
Please reach back out to us anytime to share your experiences teaching, or to ask for other resources.