Instructor Notes

Schedule

The curriculum is intended to be delivered in 2 parts over six half-days. Part 1 takes 4 half-days and teaches the theory of lesson design as well as implementing lessons using The Carpentries Workbench. At the end of part 1, learners are expected to have an outline for a whole lesson, and a detailed plan for some of its individual sections/episodes. Part 2 takes 2 half-days and teaches collaborating effectively on open lesson development projects. There is an extended break for lesson trial runs between parts 1 & 2, where learners are expected to conduct mini pilots of their lessons with the intended target audiences.

Below is a suggested schedule that can be used as a guideline to plan the content and timings for each teaching session.

Part 1

Day 1

Time	Session Title
09:00 - 09:45	Introduction
09:50 - 10:00	Break
10:00 - 10:30	Lesson Design
10:30 - 11:05	Identifying Your Target Audience
11:05 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 12:05	Defining Lesson Objectives/Outcomes 1
12:05 - 12:15	Break
12:15 - 13:00	Defining Lesson Objectives/Outcomes 2
13:00	End

Day 2

Time	Session Title
09:00 - 10:05	Example Data & Narrative
10:05 - 10:15	Break
10:15 - 11:20	Episodes
11:20 - 11:30	Break
11:30 - 12:15	Designing Exercises 1
12:15 - 12:25	Break
12:25 - 13:00	Designing Exercises 2
13:00	End

Day 3

Time	Session Title
09:00 - 10:05	How to Write a Lesson
10:05 - 10:15	Break
10:15 - 11:05	The Carpentries Workbench 1
11:05 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 12:00	The Carpentries Workbench 2
12:00 - 12:10	Break
12:10 - 13:00	Adding Lesson Content 1
13:00	End

Day 4

Time	Session Title
09:00 - 10:05	Adding Lesson Content 2
10:05 - 10:15	Break
10:15 - 11:05	How We Operate
11:05 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 12:00	Preparing to Teach 1
12:00 - 12:10	Break
12:10 - 12:30	Preparing to Teach 2
12:30 - 13:00	Wrap-up
13:00	End

Part 2

From experience, half-days 5 & 6 can probably be delivered in less than the scheduled amount of time and could potentially be folded into 1 half-day of teaching, for learner teams that are more experienced in working with GitHub.

Day 5

Time	Session Title
09:00 - 10:05	Reflecting on Trial Runs 1
10:05 - 10:15	Break
10:15 - 11:05	Reflecting on Trial Runs 2
11:05 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 12:00	Collaborating with Your Team 1
12:00 - 12:10	Break
12:10 - 13:00	Collaborating with Your Team 2
13:00	End

Day 6

Time	Session Title
09:00 - 10:05	Collaborating with Newcomers 1
10:05 - 10:15	Break
10:15 - 11:05	Collaborating with Newcomers 2
11:05 - 11:15	Break
11:15 - 12:00	Project Management and Governance 1
12:00 - 12:10	Break
12:10 - 12:30	Project Management and Governance 2
12:30 - 13:00	Wrap-up
13:00	End

Training Themes

Lesson Development as a Learning Process

A recurring theme in this training is the discussion of the benefits of piloting a new lesson and treating teaching as an opportunity to learn and improve the lesson. We have found it helpful to frame the discussion this way and to draw on our own experience when talking about the ways in which piloting a lesson can help to improve it. For example, when teaching the assessments or narrative section you might discuss a time when you piloted a workshop and realized there was a concept missing in the demo/narrative that learners needed in order to be able to complete the exercise.

Why do we adapt Nicholls’ approach?

We use a modified version of Nicholls’ five phase paradigm for curriculum design throughout the training. Nicholls’ paradigm describes a process, commonly referred to as backward design, where those who wish to develop a new curriculum first begin by defining exactly what their learners will be able to do after they have completed the lesson/training/course. The subsequent stages of the curriculum design process involve designing content to directly meet those stated outcomes.

Select learning outcomes
Choose learning experiences to help learners achieve these outcomes
Develop content to support these experiences
Assess learner progress towards desired outcomes
Evaluate chosen outcomes, experiences, and content based on this assessment

The Carpentries community specialises in relatively short-format workshops, typically lasting less than a week and including no opportunities for any assessment after the teaching has finished (a summative assessment). To account for this, our lessons (and this training) place an emphasis on formative assessment: assessment of learner progress that takes place while the teaching is still going on, to give instructors opportunities to evaluate the teaching and lesson content before the end of the workshop. The process we follow in this training reflects that emphasis, giving more attention to the design of these formative assessments (and particularly exercises) as the equivalent to the learning experiences described by Nicholls.

Introduction

Instructor Note

You might like to make a copy of the template CodiMD notetaking page and share your link with trainees so that you can take notes together during the training.

Lesson Design

Trainer Note

Trainees should have received the questions above in advance and arrived at the training with notes prepared. Where multiple trainees are working on the same lesson project, ask for a volunteer or call on someone to represent their team, leaving space afterwards for their team-mates to speak up if their answers differ.

The main objectives of this discussion are:

to ensure that the members of each collaborative team share a common vision for the lesson they want to create
to help Trainers and collaborators understand each trainee’s motivation for attending the training and building their lesson

Identifying Your Target Audience

Defining Lesson Objectives/Outcomes

Markdown Table Template for Exercise

You may find this template of a Markdown table useful to share with your trainees before they complete the next exercise.

MARKDOWN

| Objective | Action verb? | Specific | Measurable | Attainable |
|-----------|--------------|----------|------------|------------|
| 1         |              |          |            |            |
| 2         |              |          |            |            |
| 3         |              |          |            |            |

Note: if you are using the template CodiMD for notes, you will find this template table for the exercise included there.

If you are using Etherpad for collaborative notes in your training, you can use the template table for Etherpad instead.

Example Data and Narrative

Instructor Note

Outline covering the above paragraph - also used in CodiMD template.

Dataset Considerations

Ethical use (see prompts below)
License - CC0 Recommended
Complexity - Is it easy to understand? Is it sufficiently authentic?
Number and types of variables

Questions about Ethical Use of Datasets

Does the data contain personally identifiable information?
Was the data collected without permission from the groups or individuals included?
Will the data be upsetting to learners in the workshop?

Episodes

Designing Exercises

How to Write a Lesson

Trainer Note

To get started on the discussion part, try reading out an interesting response and asking for more detail from the trainee who wrote it. Ask one of the other trainers/helpers to take notes of this discussion in the collaborative note-taking document.

This is a good opportunity to remind trainees about how counter-productive it can be to try to cover more content than the time allows. (See the earlier section on lesson scope.)

Instructor Note

May want to point out that the answers in the current version of this exercise do not have diagnostic power.

The Carpentries Workbench

Instructor Note

Remind learners to paste URL of their lesson repository and the rendered version of the lesson to the collaborative document.

Activating GitHub Pages

We need to tell GitHub to begin serving the lesson website via GitHub Pages. To do this, navigate to Settings, then choose Pages from the left sidebar. Under Source, choose the gh-pages branch, leave the folder set to / (root), and click Save. You may copy the URL in this box, this will be the address of your lesson site.

Orientation for GitHub Novices

For trainees unfamiliar with the relationship between a source repository and rendered website, it is important to show the default version of the lesson website now i.e. before beginning to edit config.yaml.
It is also recommended to take time at this point to demonstrate step-by-step how to edit files in the GitHub web interface.

Adding Lesson Content

Instructor Note

You may ask each trainee in a lesson team to create an episode file for the episode they are responsible for. Be careful here to ensure that participants who are collaborating on the same repository do not create conflicts e.g. by editing the same file or creating files with identical names.

Troubleshooting the Lesson Build (~10 mins)

This is a good opportunity to pause and check in on how well trainees’ lesson builds are running. If anyone is having trouble with their workflows, ask them to share their screen and try following the troubleshooting steps to diagnose and fix the issue.

This is also a good opportunity to show what the GitHub actions look like when they are in progress, succeed, or fail if you haven’t already.

If all is well, and you are pressed for time, this section can be skipped.

How we Operate

Preparing to Teach

Part 1 Wrap-up

Adding Design Notes to the Lesson Site

If trainees would like to add the Design Notes document they have been working on to their lesson site, they can do the following:

replace the first 13 lines with

---
title: Lesson Design Notes
---

save the file to the instructors/ directory, and any images used in the file to the episodes/fig directory (the paths to source files for images will need to be adjusted to begin episodes/fig/)
add the filename below instructors: in config.yml as they have done for episode filenames below episodes: previously. For example, if their file is saved with the name ‘design-notes.md’:

YAML

# Information for Instructors
instructors:
- design-notes.md

This will make the page accessible from the ‘More’ dropdown in Instructor View.

Note that concept maps with GraphViz are not currently supported by the lesson infrastructure, so any concept maps added to the document on CodiMD will not be displayed correctly on the lesson site.

Reflecting on Trial Runs

Notes About Teaching This Episode

This episode picks-up after a long break in training for learners, you may need to remind them of the following expectations as part of training.

The Carpentries Code of Conduct
How to get in the queue to participate - hand-raising, typing in chat, etc.
Microphones muted when you aren’t speaking (if virtual)
Any other expectations for interaction

Most of the episode is facilitated discussion. You may spend a lot of time in the exercise that has them discuss the trial runs. You can especially anticipate it taking more time when training more lesson teams because they each need time to debrief and discuss with the whole group. (See Trainer Note before the Trial Run Discussion exercise below for further guidance.) Don’t panic if this happens! It has historically been easier for Trainers to fit all of the content of this second part of the training into the time available, so you can probably allow yourself some extra time if you need it.

Discussion format

For online trainings, Trainers have found it beneficial to give participants the first 5 minutes together in a breakout room, to re-familiarise themselves with the notes from their Trial Runs and discuss what they are going to report out to the rest of the group.

In trainings with a larger cohort of participants, try asking groups to assign a reporter who will be responsible for summarising their experience and answering the discussion questions on behalf of their collaborators.

Scaling this exercise to larger numbers of lesson teams

This exercise can take a long time when you have a lot of lesson teams in your training, but it is important to give every group the chance to reflect on their trial run. You may need to facilitate it differently if time becomes an issue: for example, you could paste the prompts into the CodiMD and ask all groups to write their answers, before summarising responses, identifying trends, and calling on particular trainees to share more about their individual responses.

Collaborating with Your Team

Collaborating with Newcomers

Share an example of a good README

It is helpful to share an example of a README when teaching this section. Use your own example if you have one, or otherwise share the README from the source repository of this training curriculum. We try to keep it updated and aligned with the recommendations here. Please let the Maintainers know by opening an issue or a pull request if you identify anything that could be improved.