Teacher
Summary
Aalto RSE spends a significant amount of time teaching, because that’s a good way to help the widest number of people. It also helps to bring projects into us. When we see something that is taking up a lot of our support time, we can add it to our courses to save time long-term.
Teaching isn’t just being in front of people and talking, but there are very many parts to our collaborative teaching: co-teaching, collaborative notes, livestream broadcasting, lesson development, organizing courses, and more.
Main challenges/pitfalls
Getting use to the CodeRefinery teaching style (though once you are used to it, it’s actually less work)
Managing time for lesson maintenance and development.
Teaching with the mindset of a learner (and what thy need to know), not trying to teach them to be like you, an experienced RSE.
Expectations / checklists
Take part in the Instructor kickstart program.
Optionally, take part in CodeRefinery “train the trainer”
Begin by co-teaching working lessons with experienced instructors. Do this 1-2 times.
Prepare before teaching: Teaching plan and Lesson review checklist.
Set up you computer for teaching following all the best practices (in addition to all the other things you learn during the instructor kickstart).
Take on the role of primary instructor during workshops.
There are other things you can do as well:
Broadcasting
Video editing
Course organizing
Major lesson development
etc.
External materials
Demo of livestream teaching (read the video description) by rkdarst
Motivation to CodeRefinery instructor training by rkdarst (includes ideas for teaching). (readable transcript)
Carpentries Learner-centric teaching (Link to material).
(we currently think that) This is like Carpentries instructor training, but focused on the teaching pedagogy and without the material to become a certified Carpentries instructor.
Other
Course arrangement
Teaching philosophy
Training program: materials
Exercises
Teaching-1: Explain a game
Purpose: have some fun while practicing rigorously explaining new concepts to a group (and also practicing evaluating how well the explanations went and giving recommendations to a colleague). We use these lessons in our teaching.
See Exercise: game teaching for full exercise description.
Teaching-2: Practice a course intro
Take one of the lessons we teach (or something new) and a partner (for team teaching), and give a 3-5 minute intro of the lesson to your group. Pretend that you are livestream teaching to a broad audience.
Others: give feedback and discuss.